Definition
Litigation is the process of resolving a legal dispute through the court system. It encompasses the full arc of a lawsuit: from the filing of an initial pleading, through discovery, pretrial motions, and trial, to judgment and any subsequent appeals. The term describes both the formal proceeding itself and the adversarial contest it represents — a dispute submitted to judicial authority for resolution under law.
Litigation is distinguished from other forms of dispute resolution — arbitration, mediation, negotiation — by its use of a court as the decision-making forum and by the compulsory, binding authority courts carry. A party engaged in litigation is a litigant; the attorney managing the proceeding is a litigator.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "The conduct of a lawsuit."
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The act or process of litigating; a suit at law; a judicial contest."
The common and legal meanings are closely aligned here, which is unusual. The editorial note: ordinary usage treats litigation as roughly synonymous with "lawsuit," while legal usage encompasses not just the lawsuit as a static thing but the entire dynamic process — its phases, its forum, its procedural rules, and its alternatives. The risk in research is not that the common meaning distorts the legal one, but that the apparent simplicity of the term masks meaningful complexity underneath.
Why It Matters in Research
Litigation is a gateway term in legal research rather than a precise technical concept. Its breadth is both its utility and its trap. When a source refers to "litigation" without qualification, a researcher must ask: which phase? which forum? which type of proceeding?
Forum matters enormously. Litigation in federal court follows different procedural rules than state court litigation. Tax refund litigation in the U.S. District Court operates differently than Tax Court proceedings — a distinction with substantive consequences for burden of proof, jury availability, and discovery scope. Constitutional litigation carries its own overlay of justiciability doctrines: a suit filed prematurely (ripeness) or after the underlying dispute has resolved (mootness) may not be litigable at all, regardless of its merits.
In historical corpus sources, "litigation" is used loosely to mean any contested judicial proceeding. Researchers should not assume that older uses of the term map cleanly onto modern procedural categories. Equity litigation and law litigation were once formally distinct proceedings in separate courts; the merger of law and equity under modern rules collapsed that distinction, but historical treatises and cases draw it sharply. A source discussing restraint of "further litigation" by injunction — as Bouvier notes — may be operating in a purely equitable context that has no direct modern analog.
The term also appears in secondary sources as a policy descriptor ("litigation explosion," "litigation costs," "litigation strategy"), where it carries rhetorical rather than technical weight. Researchers should distinguish these uses from technically operative ones.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three historical dictionaries are in close agreement: litigation is a judicial contest for the enforcement of a right. Black's emphasizes it as a "judicial controversy"; Rapalje & Lawrence offers the crisp "lawsuit" as a synonym; Bouvier adds the qualifying phrase "authorized by law," which grounds the concept in legitimate legal process rather than mere disputation.
Bouvier's entry is the most substantive historically. It records the equity practice of using injunctions to restrain further litigation — notably after repeated jury verdicts favored one party — illustrating that courts once had active tools for managing serial or abusive litigation. This context is useful for researchers working with early American or English equity materials, where "restraining litigation" by injunction was a recognized judicial technique. Modern courts retain inherent power to manage abusive litigation, but the formal mechanism Bouvier describes (perpetual injunction after successive verdicts) is largely historical.
None of the three historical dictionaries draw distinctions between phases of litigation or between legal and equitable proceedings as such — the term is used in a unified sense. Researchers should supply those distinctions from procedural sources when working with older materials.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Ripeness and Mootness in Constitutional Litigation — The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia (justiciability limits on when constitutional litigation may proceed)
Refund Litigation District Court — The Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia (litigation in a specialized forum with distinct procedural and substantive consequences)