East European Constitutional Review

Volume 10 Number 4

Fall 2001

Special Reports

“Demand” for Law in Russia—A Mixed Picture
Kathryn Hendley

Over the past few years, I have written a series of articles arguing that the legal reform process in Russia has been too exclusively focused on the “supply” of law and that the equally important issue of “demand” for law has been neglected.¹ My goal was to encourage Russian policymakers and foreign donors to devote more resources and official attention to reforms that are spurred by the actual needs of ordinary citizens (as documented through empirical research), rather than presuming to know what is best for society and proceeding in a top-down fashion. Over the past decade, the Soviet-era legislation and institutional structure have been thoroughly overhauled, and a multitude of new laws and legal institutions have been introduced. Most of the scholarly attention has been devoted to analyzing the content of these reforms, rather than to investigating their impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinary Russians. Such research on the “supply” of law is important but should be complemented by inquiries into the “demand” for law.

Although Ilian Cashu and Mitchell Orenstein profess to be analyzing “demand,” they have fundamentally misunderstood the concept. As used in my work, “demand” has never been commensurate with use of the courts.2 Rather, “demand” has taken on a more expansive meaning, standing for the bundle of attitudes and behavior toward law as affected by historical experience, both personal and societal. It goes beyond seeking victory in specific categories of cases to encompass a broad acceptance of law as a means of both protecting and advancing one’s interests. It is a consciously and necessarily messy and impressionistic concept. Attitudes and behavior vis-à-vis law are sometimes wildly inconsistent. As a result, efforts to measure “demand” as an ongoing phenomenon are mostly futile. While some indicators of “demand” can be catalogued, such as the number of petitions filed in a particular issue area, this sort of evidence is incapable of revealing how Russians think and feel about law more generally.

In this essay, I once again explain the concept of “demand,” providing examples drawn from my field research in Russia over the past decade. I focus on two indicators: the extent to which the interests and needs of the ultimate consumers of law are reflected in the law; and the use of courts.

Consequences of top-down legal reform

Finding the proper balance between technical perfection, political realities, and societal needs is difficult everywhere, but it has proven especially elusive in the Russian case. All too often, a concern with meeting societal needs has lagged far behind the desire to solve short-term domestic political problems and/or to catch up to the West in terms of legal infrastructure. The result tends to be legislation and legal institutions that are disconnected from society. When people cannot see a need for the law in question or have worked out for themselves some way of dealing with the problem ostensibly addressed by the law, then the law or legal institution simply lies dormant, not doing any obvious harm but not performing the function(s) for which it was intended. Alternatively, when people have no choice but to use law to accomplish their goals—when the new law constitutes the only available means to a desirable end—then it is reasonable to expect society to go through courts to make its displeasure known. As I have consistently argued, people mobilize law most often in order to realize material (rather than ideal) interests. In doing so, they become economic actors, regardless of whether they are individuals or legal entities.

Examples of both types of dissociated laws are numerous in post-Soviet Russia. The disappointing history of the antimonopoly commissions illustrates what can happen when an institution fails to resonate with the targeted community. One of the persistent criticisms of the planned economy was that industry was overly concentrated.³ In theory, an institution designed to empower small players to confront and force changes in the behavior of those with dominant market power would seem to be precisely what was needed as part of the transition from state socialism. The antimonopoly commissions were created in the early 1990s but have largely failed to take hold.⁴ The enabling law endows those without dominant market power with rights and lays out a path for realizing these rights. Yet these rights are not mobilized by most enterprises. In interviews with a wide variety of enterprise managers (including the in-house legal counsel) conducted from 1996 through 1999, many were completely unaware of the existence of the antimonopoly commission. This is confirmed by a survey of 328 enterprises, fielded in the spring of 1997, in which only 20 percent of the respondent enterprises reported any contact with this institution.⁵ Arbitrazh courts have jurisdiction over complaints involving the antimonopoly commission. Conversations with arbitrazh judges in Moscow, Saratov, and Ekaterinburg during the first half of 2001, taken together with caseload statistics, substantiate the marginal role of these commissions.⁶

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of why the antimonopoly commissions have failed to live up to the hopes of their creators. But surely a key reason is a failure to appreciate fully the deep roots of interdependence within Russian industry or, put slightly differently, an overestimation of the information flow that would come with the end of state planning. If an enterprise has a finite set of customers for its output, it is unlikely to risk alienating one of these customers by questioning its trade practices in a state-sponsored forum. This is a universal truth documented by legal sociologists in a wide variety of settings. The specifics of the Russian case would seem to harden the resistance to challenging more-powerful trading partners. Had these realities been more explicitly taken into account in the design of the antimonopoly commissions, they might have become an integral part of economic life in Russia.

My critical assessment of the antimonopoly commissions is not intended to bring into question the level of legal culture in Russia. Time is precious for all, and it stands to reason that enterprise lawyers have not spent their time learning the intricacies of an institution that does not speak to their needs.⁷ Yet there can be little doubt of the soundness of the initial impulse to create some way for the less powerful to address the more powerful through the medium of law. The resulting institution has foundered, however, due in part to a lack of concern with societal “demand.”

Not all laws that are unreflective of societal “demand” languish on the sidelines. Sometimes those targeted by the law rise up and make its inadequacies known. This is most common in issue areas in which law is unavoidable. The story of the 1998 pension law, as recounted by Cashu and Orenstein, would seem to be a good example. Pensions constitute a state-created entitlement, meaning that pensioners’ rights are defined by law. The fact that few Russian pensioners have alternative income sources gave them a strong material incentive to challenge the law when they believed it to be unfair. According to Cashu and Orenstein, the result was a change in how the law was interpreted that better served the pensioners’ interests.⁸ I had earlier documented an analogous situation.⁹ In response to petitions from cash-poor enterprises, which could not pay their filing fees up front as the law requires (even after the law had been amended in 1996 to reduce these fees),¹⁰ the Higher Arbitrazh Court reinterpreted the relevant procedural rules to allow the payment of these fees to be postponed, when the petitioner lacked cash, until the conclusion of the case.¹¹ Prior to this ruling, individual arbitrazh courts had ruled on petitions to delay filing fees in an ad hoc fashion, leading to inconsistency both within courts and between them. Thanks to the higher court’s action, the rule is now universal. Thus, poor cash flow no longer serves as a limitation on the ability to use the courts.

From the point of view of building respect for law within Russian society, how should these experiences be understood? On the one hand, they can be seen as an iterative process of trying to get the rules right. It is unrealistic to expect law makers (including both the legislative and executive branches) to be prescient. Midcourse corrections are inevitable. Perhaps the willingness of pensioners and illiquid enterprises to press their claims through the courts can be taken as an indicator of their belief in the legal system. Or maybe that is being too generous. After all, prescience was not needed to get the rules right (or at least closer to right) in either of these examples. According to Cashu and Orenstein, the pensioners were vocal in their opposition to the 1998 law while it was still in draft form. Given that pensioners are one of the most politically active and outspoken interest groups on the contemporary Russian scene,¹² law makers could hardly have expected them to sit still for a law that blatantly contradicted their interests. Likewise the cash-poor status of many Russian enterprises was not a secret; inter-enterprise arrears have pervaded the Russian economy since the early 1990s.¹³ Retaining the requirement to pay filing fees up front ran the risk of shutting many potential litigants out of the system. Why legislators did not take this into account when amending the law in 1996 is unclear. In both cases, those affected looked to the courts for relief and were eventually rewarded. Whether their participation in the judicial system can be taken as a sign of a deeper belief in the law—as a sign of their lack of apathy toward law—is uncertain. For both groups, the choices were limited. Going around the legal system was not a viable alternative. Perhaps their use of the courts was simply the most direct means to a desired end. Whether their litigation experience will leave them more or less well-disposed toward law is also a thorny question.¹⁴ Yet both stories reflect a neglect of “demand” for law by law makers.

The meaning of increased use of courts

Another way to assess the level of “demand” for law is to study the use of the courts. But figuring out how much people are using the courts (or any legal institution) and how to interpret this use (or nonuse) can be difficult. Relying solely on caseload data is highly problematic. When people are angry with one another or with the state, this dissatisfaction does not always transform itself into a lawsuit. In their seminal article, Felstiner et al. lay out a conceptual framework for understanding the disputing process.¹⁵ At the base of the pyramidal structure are the masses of inchoate injustices that everyone experiences on a daily basis. Relatively few of these perceived wrongs are ever acted upon by naming the wrongdoer or informally seeking redress; an even smaller percentage make their way to the courts.¹⁶ The reasons why claims are abandoned along the way are many and, among other things, vary according to the sort of litigants involved, the subject matter of the dispute, the access to legal expertise, and the quality of the judicial system (both real and perceived). Thus, the number of cases filed in any specific area of law represents the tip of an iceberg of potential claims, the true dimensions of which can be fleshed out only through detailed sociological research.¹⁷

This is not to say that caseload information is unimportant in understanding the use of courts. Rather, my contention is that it is only one part of the story and must be placed in context to understand just what it means. Cashu and Orenstein repeat the allegation of the chairman of the Duma Labor and Social Policy Committee that, as of March 2000, about 220,000 pension claims were pending in the courts of general jurisdiction.¹⁸ Whether this can be regarded as a significant number depends on what percentage it is of the total possible claims. Cashu and Orenstein argue that the law uniformly violated the rights of pensioners, suggesting that every pensioner had a potential claim. At the end of 1999, the total number of pensioners was approximately 38.38 million,¹⁹ meaning that less than 0.6 percent of all possible claims actually ended up in court. Assessing what the 220,000 claims mean is further complicated by the complete absence of any information about the number of pension-related claims in previous years or about the number of claims in other areas of law.²⁰ Obtaining such information is not easy in Russia, but absent some context, the meaning of politically motivated guesses is inherently equivocal.

When placed in context, caseload data can be helpful. For example, my research on how industrial enterprises use law has consistently been informed by the published national-level statistics²¹ and the unpublished regional-level statistics on the activities of the arbitrazh courts. These data have allowed me to document various trends in the use of these courts, such as the growing dominance of nonpayment cases and the steady increase in disputes involving the state as well as the persistent absence of cases involving collateral.²² I always took care to present these data, along with the outcomes of archetypical cases, as pieces of the puzzle, not as the whole picture. To be sure, they show that the arbitrazh courts are being used with greater frequency,²² but whether this has a broader spillover effect, in other words, whether it translates into a change in the underlying attitudes toward law, is less evident. Once an enterprise manager successfully uses the legal system to recover monetary damages from a reneging trading partner or a pensioner uses the legal system to force a higher payment from the state, they may apply this experience to solve other problems.²⁴ The likelihood of some spillover effect seems greater in the case of enterprise managers, who have made independent decisions to resort to the courts, than in the case of pensioners, who have been convinced to appeal to the courts for help through a sustained campaign by an interested third-party (the Communist Party).²⁵

Understanding what people think about law cannot be based exclusively on caseload data. It requires other perspectives. The investigation has to be turned around to include the litigants’ point of view. To this end, I have collaborated on the enterprise survey discussed earlier, following up on it with a series of case studies of participating enterprises.²⁶ This research confirmed that attitudes and behavior often diverge.²⁷ A sense of resignation about the legal system consistently infused my interviews with managers (conducted from 1996 through 2000). This hopelessness did not correlate with litigation behavior. In other words, apathy regarding law and high levels of litigiousness can coexist. Even at enterprises that litigated contractual disputes regularly, managers would habitually relate their distaste for the legal system, assuring me that going to court was futile and that law was the province of the rich and the well-connected.²⁸ Interestingly, their attitudes rarely correlated with their success; in other words, both the winners and losers in the litigation process emerged disgruntled. Moreover, their conjecture that the legal system has been captured by those with political and economic power is not borne out by the evidence. The dockets of the arbitrazh courts are dominated not by disputes between oligarchs, but by mundane contractual breaches. But attitudes are influenced by many factors, including gossip, media reports, and personal experience. Few ordinary people have the time to inquire into statistical data published in obscure legal journals.

The discontentment of litigants is hardly unique to Russia. Going to court is rarely a pleasant experience and everywhere requires perseverance. Indeed, when Russian courts are examined in comparative perspective, it becomes clear that they stack up well on certain criteria and less well on others.²⁹ On the positive side, Russian courts are more accessible—less procedurally complex—and resolve some categories of disputes with greater dispatch than many other courts,³⁰ which has the desirable consequence of making them relatively user-friendly.³¹ A darker picture emerges with regard to the implementation of court judgments. Though this is not actually the responsibility of the judicial system, an inability to collect inevitably redounds to the detriment of the courts.³²

No doubt in Russia, as elsewhere, part of the dissatisfaction stems from overly idealistic expectations of the judicial process. Although laymen often expect justice, the reality is that in civil (noncriminal) cases judges mostly mete out monetary damages to the victors, which are not always equivalent to justice. To expect more is to guarantee disappointment.

“Demand” for law—resisting premature conclusions

Whether “demand” for law is present or absent in Russia is not a question that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” As developed in my work over the past few years, “demand” for law is a relative concept. Thus, the question is better framed in comparative terms. We can inquire into how “demand” for law has changed over time; or we can compare the incidence of various indicators of “demand” for law between legal systems. In the Russian case, we might ask whether current “demand” for law is more or less than it had been at the outset of the reform process or during the Soviet era. Even when so posed, the question is not easily answered.

While empirical research on a variety of areas of law indicates that more people are using the courts in Russia, what proportion of all present or past disputes are brought into the legal system remains mostly unknown. As a result, even when we have caseload data, just what it tells us about “demand” is not clear. It is tempting to interpret the increased use of courts as reflecting a greater “demand” for law. But such a conclusion is just as premature now as it would have been at the time of the 1999 symposium (at which time this trend was apparent).³³ It is flawed on two counts. First, the available data on the use of courts cannot be pushed that far. Second and more important, it mistakenly implies that the use of courts is coterminous with “demand” for law rather than being one of several indicators of its relative presence.

The evidence on the question of whether law makers (both those in the legislative and executive branches) are taking greater care to incorporate the needs and interests of the ultimate users of law in their work—another indicator of “demand” for law—gives less reason for optimism. Once again, this propensity of law makers to impose their will is not unique to Russia. Indeed, often there is nothing nefarious about it. Law makers make what they believe to be reasonable assumptions about what would be best and act accordingly. Absent reliable information about the needs of ordinary people, the results often miss the mark.

Kathryn Hendley is professor of law and political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

NOTES

1. “The Spillover Effect of Privatization on Russian Legal Culture,” Transnational Law and Contemporary Politics 5, no. 1 (1995), pp. 39–64; “Law and Development in Russia: A Misguided Enterprise?” Proceedings of the American Society of International Law 90 (1996), pp. 237–40; “Legal Development in Post-Soviet Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 13, no. 3 (1997), pp. 231–56; “Rewriting the Rules of the Game in Russia: The Neglected Issue of Demand for Law,” East European Constitutional Review 8, no. 4 (1999), pp. 98–95.

2. My research on the use of law by enterprises, published before the 1999 EECR symposium, documents the increased use of arbitrazh courts over the past decade for both contractual disputes with trading partners and disputes with the state; see my “Growing Pains: Balancing Justice & Efficiency in the Russian Economic Courts,” Temple International and Comparative Law Journal 12, no. 2 (1998), pp. 302–32; “Temporal and Regional Patterns of Commercial Litigation in Post-Soviet Russia,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 39, no. 7 (1998), pp. 371–90; “Appellate Decision-Making in the Russian Arbitrazh Courts: A Three Year Assessment,” Review of Central and East European Law 24, no. 4 (1999), pp. 465–91.

3. See, for example, Paul L. Joskow, Richard Schmalensee, and Natalia Tsukanova, “Competition Policy in Russia during and after Privatization,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity: Microeconomics (1994), pp. 301–81; cf. Annette Brown, Barry Ickes, and Randi Ryterman, “Myth of Monopoly: A New View of Industrial Structure of Russia,” Policy Research Working Paper No. 1131 (The World Bank: Washington, D.C., 1994).

4. Peter J. Sahlas and Elena Reshtnikova, “Competition Law in the Russian Federation,” Review of Central and East European Law 23, no.1, pp. 49–71.

5. Kathryn Hendley, Peter Murrell, and Randi Ryterman, “Law, Relationships, and Private Enforcement: Transactional Strategies of Russian Enterprises,” Europe-Asia Studies 52, no. 4, (2000), pp. 627–56.

6. In eight of the nine courts for which I have detailed annual activities reports, the antimonopoly commissions failed to initiate a single liquidation or reorganization during 2000. The exception is the Saint Petersburg court, which witnessed two such cases. This lack of activity can be contrasted with that of the tax organs, which initiated virtually all such cases in these nine courts.

7. The alacrity with which enterprise lawyers embraced changes in the law governing contractual relations allowing them to seek penalties for late payment demonstrates that they are willing to master innovations in the law when it serves their interest. In fact, their enthusiasm for this particular innovation eventually led to its curtailment through judicial interpretation. For a full discussion of these developments, see Kathryn Hendley, Peter Murrell, and Randi Ryterman, “Punitive Damages for Contractual Breaches in Comparative Perspective: The Use of Penalties by Russian Enterprises,” Wisconsin Law Review, no. 3 (2001), pp. 639–79.

8. I am assuming the facts to be as Cashu and Orenstein related them. I am not an expert on pension law. The sloppiness of their citations and the conclusory nature of many of their statements made verifying their claims impossible.

9. Hendley, “Growing Pains.”

10. “O vnesenii izmenenii i dopolnenii v Zakon RF ‘O gosudarstvennoi poshline,’” Sobranie Zakonodatelstva Rossiiskoi Federatsii 1 (1996).

11. “O nekotorykh voprosakh primeneniya arbitrazhnymi sudami zakonodatel’stva Rossiiskoi Federatsii o gosudarstvennoi poshline,” Postanovlenie Plenuma Vysshego Arbitrazhnogo Suda Rossiiskoi Federatsii, no. 6 (March 20, 1997), Vestnik Vysshego Arbitrazhnogo Suda, no. 6 (1997), pp. 19–23.

12. For example, Timothy J. Colton (in Transitional Citizens: Voters and What Influences Them in the New Russia [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000], pp. 40–41) notes that the voting rate in the 1995 election for those in their 50s and 60s, most of whom are pensioners, was 5–6 percent higher than for other groups.

13. Barry W. Ickes and Randi Ryterman, “The Inter-enterprise Arrears Crisis in Russia.” Post-Soviet Affairs 8, no. 4 (1992), pp. 331–61; idem, “Roadblock to Economic Reform: Inter-Enterprise Debt and the Transition to Markets,” Post-Soviet Affairs 9, no. 3 (1993), pp. 231–52.

14. Recent empirical research in the US indicates that those who use the courts tend to have a more favorable attitude toward them. This research directly contradicts the common wisdom that familiarity breeds contempt in the legal setting, which was based on a 1977 public-opinion survey. See David B. Rottman, “On Public Trust and Confidence: Does Experience with the Courts Promote or Diminish It?” Court Review (Winter 1998), pp. 14–22; Herbert M. Kritzer and John Voelker, “Familiarity Breeds Respect: How Wisconsin Citizens View Their Courts,” Judicature 82, no. 2 (1998), pp. 58–64. For a qualitative approach to this issue, see William K. Muir, Jr., Law and Attitude Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967).

15. William L. F. Felstiner, Richard L. Abel, and Austin Sarat, “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, Claiming . . .” Law & Society Review 15, nos. 3–4 (1980–81), pp. 631–54.

16. Using this framework in connection with the US-based Civil Litigation Research Project, Trubek et al. (David M. Trubek, Austin Sarat, William L. F. Felstiner, Herbert M. Kritzer, and Joel B. Grossman, “The Costs of Ordinary Litigation,” UCLA Law Review 31, no.1 [1983], esp. pp. 86–87) found that “71.8% of individuals with grievances complained to the offending party, and that a dispute arose in 63% of those situations. Of these disputes, 11.2% resulted in a court filing.” They concluded that “it is clear that litigation . . . is by no means the most common response to disputes.”

17. For an application of this framework to the Russian context, see Kathryn Hendley, “Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg: Business Disputes in Russia,” in Assessing the Value of Law in Transition Economies, ed. Peter Murrell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 20–55.

18. Cashu and Orenstein assume that all of these petitions relate to the so-called “Law 113.” Yet there were over ten other changes to the pension law between 1997 and 2000. None of the several pension cases published in the bulletin of the Russian Supreme Court during this period challenge “Law 113.”

19. Goskomstat, Sotsialnoe polozhenie i uroven zhizni naseleniia Rossii 2000 (Moscow, 2001).

20. The judicial department of the Supreme Court publishes summary caseload statistics, which break out many categories of civil and administrative cases. Unfortunately, they do not provide any specific information about pension-related cases, which made it impossible to confirm the claim of 220,000 cases pending in March 2000, to assess whether this was more or less than in the past, or to compare it to other categories of cases. (“Rabota raionnykh sudov obshchei iurisdiktsii v pervom polugdii 2000 goda,” Rosiiskaiai iustitsiia, no. 12 [2000], pp. 54–57; “Rabota sudov Rossiiskoi federatsii v 1998 godu,” Rossiiskaia iustitsiia, no. 9 [1999], pp. 51–53; “Rabota sudov obshchei iurisdiktsii v 1999 godu,” Rossiiskaia iustitsiia, no. 7 [2000], pp. 57–60.)

21. For example, “Sudebno-arbitrazhnaya statistika: Osnovnye pokazateli raboty arbitrazhnykh sudov Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 1999-2000 godakh,” Vestnik Vysshego Arbitrazhnogo Suda, no. 4 (2001), pp. 12–18.

22. See Hendley, “Temporal and Regional Patterns”; “Appellate Decision-Making.”

23. The aggregate data published on use of the courts of general jurisdiction leaves the same impression with regard to many categories of cases, such as family-law disputes and consumer complaints. (“Rabota raionnykh sudov obshchei iurisdiktsii v pervom polugdii 2000 goda,” Rosiiskaiai iustitsiia, no. 12 [2000], pp. 54–57; “Rabota sudov Rossiiskoi federatsii v 1998 godu,” Rossiiskaia iustitsiia, no. 9 [1999], pp. 51–53; “Rabota sudov obshchei iurisdiktsii v 1999 godu,” Rossiiskaia iustitsiia, no. 7, [2000] pp. 57–60.)

24. Hendley, “The Spillover Effect.”

25. Given that the lawyers in the legal-assistance bureaus organized by the Communist Party receive a percentage of any amounts awarded to pensioners by the courts, the more appropriate analogue in the US setting would seem to be personal-injury lawyers, not civil rights activists.

26. See the enterprise survey already cited, Hendley, Murrell, and Ryterman, “Law, Relationships, and Private Enforcement”; for subsequent case studies, Hendley, “How Russian Enterprises Cope with Payments Problems,” Post-Soviet Affairs 15, no. 3 (1999), pp. 201–34.

27. This conflict between what people think about law and how they actually behave when disputes arise is not unique to Russia. Legal sociologists have confirmed it in many contexts. See, for example, Patricia Ewick and Susan S. Silbey, The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Carol J. Greenhouse, Barbara Yngvesson, and David M. Engel, Law and Community in Three American Towns (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); Stewart Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study,” American Sociological Review 28, no. 1 (1963), pp. 55–67.

28. Hendley, “Beyond the Tip of the Iceberg.”

29. For a thorough assessment of the Russian courts of general jurisdiction, see Peter H. Solomon and Todd S. Foglesong, Courts and Transition in Russia: The Challenge of Judicial Reform (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000). For an analogous analysis of the arbitrazh courts, see Kathyrn Hendley and Peter Murrell, “Dispute Resolution in Russia: A Regional Perspective” (mimeograph, 2001). See also Hendley, “Appellate Decision-Making”; “Growing Pains”; “Temporal and Regional Patterns”; Glenn P. Hendrix, “The Experience of Foreign Litigants in Russia’s Commercial Courts,” in Assessing the Value of Law in Transition Economies, ed. Peter Murrell (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), pp. 94–132; idem, “Business Litigation and Arbitration in Russia,” International Lawyer 31, no. 4 (1997), pp. 1075–1103.

30. For example, the arbitrazh courts resolve the overwhelming majority of contractual disputes within 2 months of filing (Hendley and Murrell, “Dispute Resolution in Russia”; Hendley, “Temporal and Regional Patterns,” p. 384). By contrast, a study of US courts found that contractual disputes took an average of 30 months to resolve (Michael Heise, “Justice Delayed? An Empirical Analysis of Civil Disposition Time,” Case Western Law Review 50, no. 4 [2000], pp. 813–49, esp. p. 835).

31. Hendley, “Growing Pains.”

32. For a fuller assessment of the courts of general jurisdiction, see Solomon and Foglesong, Courts and Transition; on the arbitrazh courts, see Hendrix, “Business Litigation,” and Hendley and Murrell, “Dispute Resolution in Russia.”

33. Cashu and Orenstein contend that the participants in the 1999 symposium should have been aware of the increased use of courts by pensioners. Precisely how the participants were to come by this information is a mystery. Neither the published statistics nor the published judicial decisions address this supposed “massive, national, and coordinated court campaign.”

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