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the procedural justice research has been conducted, people may sue their governments in pursuit
of fairness. They have already come to view the courts as legitimate institutions thanks to
decades if not centuries of experience that at some point produced outcomes favorable to private
individuals over the state. In such circumstances, expectations of continued fairness may seem
quite reasonable, even after new evidence of unsatisfactory outcomes (Gibson, Caldeira, and
Baird 1998; Baird 2001). Recently communist or other authoritarian regimes, in contrast, have
no history of judicial legitimacy and little pre-existing evidence that courts can be fair (Hendley
1996; Krasnov 2002, 94). In these very different circumstances, expectations of procedural
fairness might seem an unrealistic motivation to experiment with new judicial processes.
We speculated that the relationship between perceived unfairness and pioneering
litigation might be explained by the anger that unfairness provokes, particularly among the
politically disadvantaged. The desire to express anger might be a more realistic motivation to
experiment with new judicial processes than expectations of fairness. However, if anger were
the only motivation for judicial pioneers, this might be a depressing state of affairs for
democratic reformers and their advocates who hope that citizens will initiate lawsuits for more
flattering, pro-system reasons. To see whether such alternative motivations might exist, we
return to the results of our multivariate analysis. The analysis suggested that instrumental
motivations may play a role in litigation and that those who believe they have some chance of
winning the lawsuit may be more likely to become judicial pioneers. Belief in the plausibility of
winning may not be as unambiguously pro-system a motivation for litigation as belief in the
fairness of courts, but underlying the belief in the plausibility of winning is probably some
confidence that the system could serve the litigant’s interests.
Here too, though, idealist democrats might be troubled by the idea that the plausibility of
Convention