Union miners stand together, Heed no operator’s tale. Keep your hands upon the dollar, And your eyes upon the scale. —verse from “Miner’s Lifeguard” [Silverman 1975: 389] In 1895, Fayette County, West Virginia, a leading coal county in the southern West Virginia coal fields, experienced widespread strikes by miners. The strikes were remarkable because, in an American industry known for violent labor relations and intensive union organizing since the appearance of the Molly Maguires in Pennsylvania before 1880, this was the first major strike in southern West Virginia. We might attempt to understand the role of law and public authority in these strikes in terms of legal repression by means of the labor injunction, labor conspiracy laws, and strikebreaking by the police and military. But none of these occurred in Fayette in 1895, though the later history of labor conflict in West Virginia is replete with all of them. In another way, however, the legal events accompanying these strikes are far more remarkable and challenge us to examine more subtle connections between class conflict and law.

This article examines the theory and empirical methods of recent studies of law and litigation. It argues that the recent interest in longitudinal studies of trial court dockets proceeds from a deeply rooted functionalist theoretical tradition in empirical work on courts. Functionalist theory, through its sophisticated application in the work of James Willard Hurst, is described as the direct or indirect source of theory for longitudinal litigation studies. Though there are many reasons for suspecting that fuctionalist theory is inadequate, it has seldom been rejected through proper empirical testing of its hypotheses. The theory, often poorly conceptualized, is discussed here in detail. Hypotheses derived from a careful reading of Hurst and others are operationalized, employing data from the dockets of three West Virginia trial courts between 1870 and 1925, and a test of the hypotheses is constructed taking advantage of the historical variation in the economic development of three neighboring counties. Conclusions supported by the analysis of these data are largely prophylactic. Research can address the widespread problems of poor conceptualization and data analysis that have limited the value of much longitudinal trial court docket research. If court function is to continue to be the focus, theory, it is argued, must take account of the social organization of relations between litigants outside the courts, as well as the organization of the courts themselves. Data analysis must address the measurement of the power, litigation capacity, and perception of usefulness of litigation held by litigants. Illustrating the value of hypothesis testing as employed here, it is contended, these conclusions about appropriate future directions and methods for longitudinal court docket research are based on properly supported findings.