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Legal Insurance, Litigant Decisions, and the Rising Caseloads of Courts: A West German Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Erhard Blankenburg
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Abstract

German prepaid legal insurance is growing both in terms of number of households insured and in terms of extending coverage to new legal areas. Fears for a litigation explosion, however, can be shown to be unfounded—just as are hopes that legal insurance would remove social inequalities of access to law. The use of legal insurance turns out to be much more limited than could have been expected. Major effects on financing lawsuits occurred only in defense against traffic fines and regulating traffic accidents. Litigation behavior as measured by indicators of litigiousness (such as risking a lawsuit with poor chance for success, resisting settlement, filing an appeal) does not seem to be affected by removing cost considerations. It appears that social costs determine inclination to litigate to a greater degree than do financial costs.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , 1982 , pp. 601 - 624
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

*

This article is a summary of a study jointly done by Jann Fielder and myself at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. The full report was published as DIE RECHTSSCHUTZVERSICHERUNGEN UND DER STEIGENDE GESCHAFTSANFALL DER GERICHTE (1981). I would like to thank David Trubek, who encouraged me to write this article and who commented on an earlier version, and Richard Miller and Robert Sikorski, who helped to bring it into decent English.

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