TIME, LEGAL CULTURE AND LEGAL PROCESS

• Pages: 96-116
• Published date: 08 November 2001
• Date: 08 November 2001
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S1521-6136(2001)0000003008
• Author: Robert Dingwall,William. L. F. Felstiner,Tom Durkin

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TIME, LEGAL CULTURE AND

LEGAL PROCESS

Robert Dingwall, William. L. F. Felstiner and

Tom Durkin

ABSTRACT

The social sciences have recently become increasingly interested in time as

a dimension of social organization. This paper examines the litigation of

personal injury claims as a temporal order. It begins with a brief

introduction to the tradition of sociological writing on time and identifies

the times principally involved in civil litigation. Data are introduced from

a 1980s study of U.K. litigation about asbestos disease exposure.

This historical material is analysed as a temporal order produced by the

intersecting times of the various participants. The subsequent reconstruction

of this system by the Woolf reforms introduced in April 1999 is discussed.

This has been commonly viewed as an internal rationalization in the face

of globalization, replacing the anarchy of unregulated time management

with active judicial regulation. However, it is argued that the reform may

be better understood as a marker of judicial impotence and that its effects

are less an extension of court control than a further retreat before the

hegemony of the market.

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Legal Professions: Work, Structure and Organization, pages 95–116.

Copyright © 2001 by Elsevier Science Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.

ISBN: 0-7623-0800-1

INTRODUCTION

The French sociologist of law, Jacques Commaille (1998), has remarked on the

recent growth of interest in studies of time and social organization. The social

sciences, he argues, are responding to a perceived crisis of global society, where

the foundations of social order are being rearranged. In such a context,

nothing lends itself better than time to that exercise proper to the social sciences of placing

into a social perspective that which appears to be a given of nature. More than ever, it

ought to be permitted, and necessary, to consider that “time does not exist” and that it owes

more to legality than to causality. It only exists, in effect, through the customs of societies,

and the groups and institutions that constitute them, which construct it as a “convention”,

acknowledging thereby the existence of “differences in social ordering through the manner

of experiencing and measuring time”. As Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss wrote, “Ideas

as abstract as those of time and space are, at each moment of their history, tightly linked

to a corresponding social organization”. That is why sociology moves to complete our under-

standing of time through the idea of “social time” and of a “multiplicity of social times”.1

Commaille explores this theme through a discussion of attempts to accelerate

the criminal justice process in France, which he presents as a struggle between

‘legal time’ and the ‘socio-political’ time associated with a ‘Post-Fordist’ society

reacting to the problems of order represented by youth crime and by the urban

questions of unemployment and ethnic diversity. This paper follows Commaille

by examining the traditional temporal organization of the civil justice process

in England and the attempt to accelerate it by the ‘Woolf reforms’ introduced

from 26 April 1999. It argues that Commaille’s analysis of legal time may

oversimplify the phenomenon – although he refers to ‘temporalités juridiques’,

he does not explore the plurality of times associated with the legal system.

Insofar as the Woolf reforms represent an assertion of the dominance of one

of these times, however, the question arises, in the light of Commaille’s discus-

sion, as to whether this is actually the victory that it seems or whether it reflects

a parallel transformation of a legal system by a much wider restructuring of

social order. This, in turn, may raise questions about the self-sufficiency of law

and the extent to which it can indeed be seen as a closed and self-reproducing

system.

TIME AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

Goody (1968, p. 30) summarized the basic issues about time and social orga-

nization in an essay for the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences:

Since all human activities occur in time, the existence of a social system necessitates some

organization of time. Such organization entails:

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96 R. DINGWALL, W. L. F. FELSTINER AND T. DURKIN