Saks and other scholars emphasize that we cannot interpret variations at the tip of the tort pyramid--in this case, the number of tort cases filed in the provincial court--without considering the number of injuries that occur at the base of the pyramid (see, e.g., Saks 1992; Galanter 1996). If litigated cases at the tip of the pyramid increase at the same rate as injuries at the base, for example, then litigation rates can be viewed as holding constant, even though superficially, tort litigation may appear to be growing. In Chiangmai, however, the opposite seems to be happening.There is good reason to think that the number of injuries at the base of the tort pyramid has increased by a very considerable amount since 1965, yet the number of tort cases litigated in the Chiangmai Provincial Court from 1965 to 1996 has remained almost unchanged in relation to population. The most plausible conclusion one can draw from these figures, as imperfect as they may be, is that litigation rates for tort cases in Chiangmai have actually decreased during the years of globalization.

Moreover, only a small percentage of tort cases involve personal injuries-- only 66 out of 633 tort claims brought from 1992 to 1997, all but 3 of which arose out of traffic accidents. Unfortunately, these breakdowns are not available for the litigation figures from 1965 to 1974, and therefore comparisons of personal injury torts across time cannot be made. Nevertheless, it is possible to conclude that personal injury litigation in Chiangmai in the 1990s is very rare--much more rare than tort litigation generally--and that nowadays it almost never occurs outside the context of traffic accidents.

An individual who suffers personal injuries in Thailand has another litigation option: He or she may choose to litigate in a criminal court by pursuing a private criminal case, even if the government decides not to prosecute. [FN19] Such cases are comparable to tort cases, in the sense that they are brought by a private individual, either alone or, in some instances, in cooperation with the public prosecutor. Although the stated goal of the private criminal plaintiff is punishment of the defendant, nearly all such cases were withdrawn as soon as a private settlement was reached, making them quite similar in their remedial function to a tort action. It is significant, therefore, that this type of litigation has also declined substantially over the past quarter century.During the four years of my earlier study (1965, 1968, 1971, and 1974), I found 33 private criminal actions that were based on personal injury claims, [FN20] but during the six years from 1992 to 1997 only 8 private criminal cases involving personal injuries were litigated in the Chiangmai Provincial Court. The number of private criminal cases arising out of personal injuries was sharply reduced since the period of rapid social and economic change in the 1980s and 1990s.

In sum, there is strong evidence of a substantial decrease in litigation rates for personal injury cases at the tip of the injury pyramid-- both civil and private criminal cases--which parallels the skeptical and distanced view of law expressed in the injury narratives at the base of the pyramid. Although this study cannot determine exactly why personal injury litigation has decreased, it is reasonable to assume that the relationship between legal consciousness, as evidenced in the injury narratives, and litigation behavior is mutually reinforcing. That is, the dearth of litigation contributes to individual perceptions of injuries and remedies in which law plays a marginal role at best; and the marginality of law in everyday legal consciousness makes ordinary people less likely to consider litigation when they weigh their responses to an injury. The mutually constitutive relationship between legal consciousness and the use or nonuse of formal legal institutions has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention (e.g., Sarat and Kearns 1995; Ewick and Silbey 1998; Engel and Munger 2003). Such a view does not exclude the possibility that other institutions or practices might also affect the use or nonuse of formal law and might contribute to the mutually constitutive relationship between legal consciousness and the law itself. In the Thai case, the intermediate levels of the injury pyramid are relatively unexplored territory, and further research is needed to shed light on other factors that might operate to increase or decrease litigation rates in injury cases.

For example, the changing role of liability insurance in Thai legal culture has yet to be studied. During my earlier research from 1965 to 1974, liability insurance in Chiangmai was extremely rare, but in 1993 a limited form of no-fault motor vehicle insurance became mandatory throughout Thailand (Royal Edict B.E. 2535 [1992]). Yet the impact of insurance on the litigation of personal injury cases is difficult to determine, and it is not clear whether it has tended to increase, decrease, or have no significant effect on litigation rates. Certainly, routine nonjudicial settlements with insurance companies under a modified no-fault arrangement are now possible, yet the interviews with individual injury victims suggest that such settlements are small and often unsatisfactory if they occur at all. The maximum coverage for personal injury under the mandatory basic plan is only 10,000 baht (approximately $250). Insurance payments were not a prominent feature of the injury narratives, and in fact, interviewees usually did not mention them. One insurance agent explained that insurance had little effect on the attitudes and practices of injury victims, because they considered the small payments to be insignificant and irrelevant. The central issue, she contended, is the personal relationship between the injured person and the injurer: "Most people want the other party to pay something. They're not satisfied if they get paid only by the insurance company." Under current law, moreover, injured persons can still bring lawsuits against defendants or their insurance companies for damages that exceed the basic coverage plan, and 6 of the 66 injury cases litigated from 1992 to 1997 named insurance companies as convenient deep-pocket defendants. Furthermore, plantiffs' insurance companies can sue defendants by exercising their right of subrogation: 10 of the 66 injury cases fit this description. Thus, motor vehicle insurance is now part of the litigation picture in Chiangmai, but whether it diminishes or increases litigation--or has little effect one way or the other--is not yet clear.

A second subject that merits further study is the structure and role of the bar. As a preliminary matter, one might ask whether the number of lawyers in Chiangmai has increased or decreased since 1965, since the supply of lawyers might affect the number of lawsuits that appear in the Chiangmai Provincial Court. Although documentary evidence on theChiangmai bar for 1965 is not available, officials at the Thai Law Society estimate that the number of lawyers inChiangmai at that time did not exceed 100. By contrast, the number of registered attorneys inChiangmai in 2001-2002 totaled 577. [FN21] Further information about the practice specialties of local attorneys is not readily available. It is clear, however, that the relative stability in injury cases per population and the decrease in litigation per injury in Chiangmai cannot be explained by a steady or decreasing number of attorneys available to bring such cases. In fact, the number of attorneys has probably increased more than fivefold.

Although these and other aspects of the entire injury pyramid in Thailand await further study, the strong and consistent themes of the injury narratives are compelling in their own right, and the parallel between these narratives and the declining use of the provincial court by injured persons is particularly striking. Both of these phenomena--at the base and tip of the pyramid--suggest a changing conception of self, causation, remedy, and law. Both suggest the profound influence of social and cultural transformations associated with "globalization" and, as a consequence, a shift in the role of law, although not in the direction one might have predicted.

Internal migrations and the disintegration of traditional village structures and practices have meant the loss of locality-based remedy systems in personal injury cases and have created barriers for mediation. Injured persons and their injurers find it increasingly difficult to identify a common authority figure who can act as a trusted go-between and help them to resolve their dispute. It would be natural under these circumstances to expect an increase in personal injury claims litigated in the Chiangmai Provincial Court either as torts or as private criminal prosecutions, and such an increase would be consistent with long-standing theories about litigation and socioeconomic development (see, e.g., the literature summarized in Munger 1990). Yet this study has uncovered strong evidence that injured persons in Chiangmai rarely perceive their mishap in legal terms and that tort claims not only failed to increase but they actually decreased substantially when measured against the growing number of incidents that might have led to litigation. In short, formal legal recourse is not a part of everyday consciousness, and as a form of social practice it has become even less frequent than it was in years past. The next section of this article offers an explanation for this puzzling finding.

7. JUSTICE, BUDDHISM, AND LAW AVOIDANCE

Twenty-five years ago, before the radical transformations associated with "globalization" in Thailand, litigation rates were relatively low, [FN22] yet remedies were often available to injury victims through locally sanctioned practices backed by community pressures. The norm among ordinary people who suffered injuries was "remedies without rights," in the sense that they turned to a well-established remediation process in which the law played only a small part. Today, recourse to law is even less frequent than before, as measured by tort cases per injury. At the same time, access to locally sanctioned remedies has been diminished by the process of social change, leaving most of the injury victims in this study with little or no compensation. The injury narratives, including the story told by Buajan, suggest that a remedial vacuum now exists that could be--but thus far has not been--filled by law. They also suggest that an explanation for the absence of law can be found in the emergence of a new form of religious consciousness.

Buajan's injury narrative, as we have seen, presents numerous causal explanations for the harm that has befallen her, including the effects of spirits,malevolent ghosts, bad stars, and negligence. Buajan, like nearly all the injury victims, also offers karmic explanations rooted in Buddhist doctrine, and these explanations point to the injured person's own misdeeds in a previous life or in her current existence. Although the injurer may be a wrongdoer, the deeper explanation makes him or her essentially an agent of the injury victim's own destiny, which was set in motion by her own bad choices and actions. Often, the injury narratives portray the two parties-- injurer and victim--as locked in a karmic embrace that spans many existences. In this lifetime, the old man injured Buajan, but in a previous lifetime Buajan injured the old man, and so on. The cycle will continue through future reincarnations unless it can be stopped by a virtuous response rather than an aggressive effort to retaliate or merely to seek compensation. The Buddhist virtues of forgiveness, mercy, nonaggression, and selflessness represent the ideal response to injury, since they acknowledge the deeper issues of causality and are therefore most likely to bring an end to the suffering that has probably extended over many lifetimes.

[FN19]. See note 11 supra.

[FN20]. Numerous other private criminal actions were litigated for offenses that did not involve personal injuries.

[FN21]. A list of names of all attorneys registered in the province of Chiangmai in 2001-2002 was provided to the author by the Lawyers Association of Chiangmai Province.

[FN22]. During the years 1965-1974, civil litigation rates in the Chiangmai Provincial Court ranged from 0.64 to 0.87 cases per 1,000 population (Engel 1978, 45-46).Comparable studies of local trial courts from the same time period suggest that these numbers are indeed quite low. For example, a study of a local court in a small town in Turkey found that in 1967 the civil litigation rate was approximately 21.8 cases per thousand population (Starr and Pool 1974, 550). Friedman and Percival's study (1976, 277) of the local superior courts in Alameda and San Benito counties of California showed that in 1970 they handled 11.0 and 10.2 cases per thousand population respectively.