Syn�goroi are widely known in Athenian law to have served as supporting speakers and aids to the main prosecutors within a courtroom. Lene Rubinstein argues that these people were an important part of court practice and social and political litigation, though largely ignored in many previous studies of Athenian politics. Her study draws extensively on the speeches of syn�goroi , revealing their multi-functionality as witnesses, as co-speakers alongside the main prosecutor and as part of a collaborative legal team.

While some litigants frequently file cases, very few opposing pairs of litigants appear together frequently. Thus, there is little opportunity for litigants to develop trust or reputation. Lawyers, on the other hand, face each other frequently and participate in a community of lawyers that shares information. Lawyers may therefore foster efficient dispute resolution by turning one-shot client interaction into a repeated game. This suggests the following empirical question: Are disputes resolved more quickly by agents (lawyers) who interact frequently, either as individuals or through their firms? We have assembled a dataset on roughly 2000 federal civil cases filed in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania in 1994, supplementing the ICPSR data with attorney, and firm, identity. After accounting for individual attorney speed, we find that cases involving attorney pairs who interact repeatedly in our data are resolved more quickly and are more likely to settle.

The reports collected in this book were prepared at the initiative and under the auspices of the Project on International Procedure of the School of Law of Columbia University within the framework of its co-operation with the Commission on International Rules of Judicial Procedure, a body created by Act of Congress of September 2, 1958, 72 Stat. 1743. The Commission is charged with studying domestic and foreign procedures of international co-operation in litigation with a view to suggesting improvements. Since June 1960, the Project has assisted the Commission in carrying out this statutorily assigned task. Work on the reports here presented was begun in the fall of 1960. The Project invoked the assistance of an active practitioner in each of the foreign countries se1ected and submitted to hirn an extensive questionnaire summarizing American procedures and posing detailed quest ions about foreign practices. The elaborate answers to these questionnaires provided the information on which the American co authors relied in drafting the English versions of the reports. By having proceeded in this fashion, the Project hopes to have prepared reports that reflect the knowledge and experience of the foreign practitioners and at the same time are drafted in terms intelligible to common law lawyers. Furthermore, to ensure that the reports would take due account of official views, in almost all instances, final drafts of the reports were submitted for comments and suggestions to appropriate foreign public officials.

At head of title : European Commission Research Project on Judicial Cooperation in Matters of Intellectual Property and Information Technology.