At first sight, the vastly different litigation frequencies in West Germany and The Netherlands present a riddle, as both countries have a legal system tradition in common and their baseline of potentially litigious conflicts is very much alike. This study tries to find an explanation by disaggregating various kinds of civil procedures. The distinguishing variables are found in the presence or absence of institutions filtering disputes at the pretrial stage. While in The Netherlands plaintiffs are offered a bigger set of alternatives for dispute resolution, the German court system, being very cost efficient, attracts masses of petty claims. Thus, it is unnecessary to look for attitudinal differences or even different “litigation mentalities” in the neighboring cultures. The institutional infrastructure is sufficient to explain why it is rational for Germans to use the courts and for the Dutch to avoid them.

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The concept of “reflexive law” contains two mutually contradictory elements: a doctrine of legal restraint and the notion that restraint can be achieved by procedural rather than substantive regulation. This critique argues that new procedures have historically not replaced substantive regulation but instead have repeatedly introduced more substantive and more formal regulations. Teubner's thesis that “reflexive law” manifests an “evolutionary tendency” is refuted, just as is the claim that his thesis could be inferred from sociological theories such as those of Luhmann or Habermas. As is so often the case in legal theory, “evolutionism” is used as a mask for the legitimation of presumably “progressive” legal ideas.