Ottoman History Podcast - Economics and Justice in the Ottoman Courts

Episode Date: April 11, 2016

with Boğaç Ergenehosted by Nir Shafir Download the podcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Were Ottoman courts just? Boğaç Ergene discusses this basic question in this podcast by forging a new path beyond the earlier views of the justice system as inherently fickle and capricious—immortalized in Weber’s concept of kadijustiz—and the idealistic views of Ottoman courts as a site of equal and fair treatment for all. Drawing on the results of research for his forthcoming publication with Metin Coşgel entitled The Economics of Ottoman Justice, Ergene argues for employing the quantitative methods of “law and economics” scholars, demonstrating that entrenched power holders in early modern Ottoman society were always able to use the Ottoman court system to produce outcomes favorable to themselves.  « Click for More »

you're listening to the adamant history podcast to find out more about today's topic or check out some of our other episodes along with maps images documents and other materials related to the history of the adamant empire and the modern middle east visit us on the web at adamant history podcast.com. Hello, and welcome to the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Nir Shafir, and today we'll be speaking with Dr. Boac Ergenay. Welcome to the podcast. Hello. Thanks for having me. Dr. Ergenay is an associate professor of history at the University of Vermont. He's recently finished preparing a new book

with Metin Coşgel called The Economics of Ottoman Justice. And today we're going to be talking precisely on this topic. What is justice in the Ottoman Empire? How do we find it? And specifically, we're going to be looking at the courts. Now, the courts are one of the central institutions of the Ottoman Empire. It's been the focus of historians' work for much of the past 20, 30 years. And these courts have left us voluminous records, thousands upon thousands of defters, of notebooks, of their judgments, of the cases that people brought to them.

And we'll be talking about how did people use them, who benefited from them, and how can we actually write new types of histories with these court records. So let's just start with this basic question. What are these court records? How do we use them? How have people used them before? Yes, the question is a really interesting one, and it's an issue, how to use the court records that many historians, generations of historians before us and presumably after us, will continue to focus on. These are essentially the archives of the Sharia court in the Ottoman Empire. And when I mean by Sharia court, I mean all these local, provincial, as well as central courts, central in the sense that they were located in the capital of the Ottoman Empire,

that operated, that enforced justice, that enforced Islamic law and the sultan's laws to common men and women as well as those who were under the direct employment of the sultan. They enforced justice in the sense that they enforced sharia as formulated by Ottoman jurists, and they enforced kanuns, that is, sultan's law. And they, as much as possible, tried to resolve disputes among the people of Ottoman Empire. And also, they were responsible with maintaining and managing the districts, the locations under their control. and managing the districts, the locations under their control. When we say court, it is in fact an interesting terminological choice because courts were not only involved in enforcing justice,

but they were also busy with maintaining or managing the administrative responsibilities in their jurisdictions. That included, for example, municipal responsibilities, that included tax collection, that included enforcing prices, official prices determined locally. And this is a spectrum of responsibilities that the courts took upon their shoulders. And they were incredibly important, as you mentioned,

institutions at the local level, but also ideologically, because one of the most important ideological responsibilities of this course was to represent sultan's justice to his subjects. So there's a practical side of that story in the sense that when peoples of the Ottoman sultans thought about justice, courts played an important role in demonstrating what that meant to people. Right. They're the most tangible institution, place to go to for – to seek that sort of justice and to interact with the state in a sense. Absolutely. And if you look at the work of earlier generation of scholars, one of the points that come true in their work very clearly is that court was one institution that the central government used to hold in check their non-judicial representatives and officials in their provinces. What I mean is governors or sub-governors, all these military administrative officers, representatives of the Sultan, who had a tendency to control their activities, to hold them in check, to kind of curb them from exploiting the local people, at least beyond certain limits.

So in that sense as well, courts served an ideological purpose. So there's this one place for essentially all members of the population to come and have some sort of equal standing before the sultan, or let's say, sorry, equal standing before the state, and it was some ideal space of justice. But from what I understand, this is kind of the older scholarship. And this is the ideological and technical and in principle representation of the court. The issue is to what extent the court fulfilled the service.

So did it? I mean, are we talking about, let's say, a peasant coming up, coming to the court, having the same sort of justice as others? Or, you know, how do we approach this question of how did the courts actually function? And that's the fascinating question. And that's the fascinating type of research. You know, we have all question, and that's the fascinating type of research. You know, we have all these narratives and representations of the operations of the court. You know, they are supposed to be this location in which justice is enforced in the name of the sultan so that people were in peace and people and common people, the subjects of the sultan, remain loyal so that, you know, the limits of exploitation or limits of other forms of corruption were kept in check. This is how the system represented,

the politics of Ottoman Empire represented the operations of the court. And this is what earlier generations of historians kind of picked up and represented or emphasized when they are dealing, trying to explain the functions of the court. The question is, to what extent this was the case? And the second question, from the perspective of a historian who's interested in the practice of legal sphere or practice of law, how do we answer that question? What do we do to be able to understand to what extent courts reproduced the hierarchies within the system or kind of prevented already existing power differentials to take advantage on the, you know, already, you know, the power holders to take advantage of those people who are relatively weaker in terms of their, you know, social and political statuses.

And what we do with myself and my collaborator, Metin Joshgal at the University of Connecticut, who is an economist, is try to find a way by looking at thousands of court cases and find a mechanism, find a way, find a methodology, define a methodology to be able to provide relatively reliable answers to these questions.

So you're talking about a quantitative approach rather than, I mean, from what, okay, so you're talking about a quantitative approach to the court records, which is quite different from the way it's been usually approached, which is, you know, either just as a kind of pure collection of facts that we just interpret unproblematically or as a sort of text that we then need to kind of, that we need to interpret as a socially constructed text, and that can just be used anecdotally for small bits of information.

But you're proposing a different way of a… I think we are proposing, and to answer your question, yes. We are proposing a methodology that is, one, quantitatively oriented. And secondly, it is very much informed with those methodologies that, until this point, did not exist in Ottoman history writing, what's known as, in the literature on Western legal studies, law and economics approach. And we are trying to combine these two methodological choices to be able to answer this question, able to answer this question, how did courts enforce justice in a fashion that we think to be, we would like, we imagine to be new in Ottoman history writing? You are right in your impression

about the fact that, you know, the prevalent tendency in Ottoman historiography, as it relates to the operations of the courts, as it relates to the legal practices, that it has been relatively anecdotal. What historians used to do is study certain defters, collections of these court cases, and get essentially an impressionistic understanding of how the courts operated. So this is very impressionistic. It's anecdotal. They are not without value. They are valuable, obviously, because they generate all these questions that are questioned. But the answers to those questions themselves are not particularly analytically sound. So in order to be able to answer,

provide better answers to these questions, we have to look at greater samples of cases and analyze them in sound fashions, and that requires a quantitative orientation. So we do that. But second part of that question is that we have to look at how other scholars, not necessarily Ottomanists, in fact, non-Ottomans, have tried to answer the ways in which, the question of the ways in which the court affected power differentials in a provincial community or in a particular community. So that requires a holistic approach based on certain kind of modeling of court client behavior or litigant or disputant behavior and kind of combine this with already established quantitative techniques to create and to generate an answer that hasn't been approached, that hasn't been tried before.

That's what we do in our manuscript, The Economics of Ottoman Justice. So you mentioned the power differentials in the court system, in Ottoman systems of justice. Can you just give us some examples? I mean, you know, those of us that have worked with the court records kind of know some of the anecdotal cases. Can you just provide some more concrete examples of how this works? And then how do we move beyond the anecdote to some sort of more systematic view? Yeah. I mean, imagine a case in which a high-ranking military administrative official in a particular provincial context, let's say governor, is being sued by a peasant woman. We cannot assume that these two disputants' access to information or

social or personal connections are on the same level with each other. We can't assume that their knowledge of the law or tools of litigation or evidentiary processes are identical. So, in the same fashion today, you know, we cannot imagine, for example, a person, an individual in a pharmaceutical company having access to all these kind of legal sources can be on par with each other in the court of law. We cannot assume in the Ottoman context that a governor and a peasant, having all these different kind of differentials, the variety of differentials, you know, in terms of their status, in terms of their wealth, in terms of their connections, in terms of their knowledge, operate at the same level. So the idea is that

how do we see, how do we understand the results of litigation processes and kind of decipher these power differentials among litigants, among disputants in those results? You can try to do that by studying, for example, 10 litigations in which we can identify explicit power differentials between Muslims versus non-Muslims, for example, or men versus women, for example, or, for example, official title holders, provincial military administrative executive officers versus peasants. at 2,000 of these cases and kind of, you know, identify, isolate each every component and provide a much more systematic, analytically sound analysis of these differentials at every level. Let's assume a case, right? The wife of a governor who's a female. So, in terms of her gender, in a relatively weaker position, let's

say, assuming compared to a man, but at the same time, she might have access to her husband's sources or her family's resources in the court, challenging a peasant over an issue or dispute over land. You have to have adequate numbers of observations to be able to differentiate the gender status of one disputant and differentiate it from her social economic status. And then, you know, make a comparison to the disputants who may be, you know, Muslims and peasants, but at the same time male. So that kind of very complex differential analysis requires a regression analysis.

You cannot just look at that case and say that, for example, if the peasant man wins, a man won over a woman. That's the case, but that doesn't tell the entire story. Unless you have a great number of observations, litigations, and a basis to differentiate all these each litigant characteristics from one another and kind of compare those litigant characteristics and the results that they received in the court of law and kind of mix and match with different scenarios, which you can do with regression analysis, you cannot have a relatively sound analysis of the court results by impressions only. That's what we try to do. That's why a relatively sophisticated quantitative analysis is necessary, and that's what we try to do. So you worked on the court records of Castamonu.

Your first book was on those court records, and now this is the basis for your now quantitative study of the court records. So can you give us an example of how these power differentials work from a quantitative point of view? The great thing about the collection that we have from Customona in terms of its court records is that it's a continuous collection in terms of temporality. The collection begins at the very end of the 17th century and continues until mid-19th century. So what we did was to systematically analyze the court records was to, you know, we focused

on three 10-year sample periods, one from the beginning of the 17th century, one from the middle of it, one middle of the 18th century, and one at the end of the 18th century. So, the idea here is to, first of all, to get adequate number of observations from the re-sample periods, but also see legal change if certain patterns are shifting over time. As you know, 17th and 18th centuries are incredibly interesting time periods. Historians are now arguing that major economic and social developments taking place during this period. We thought that it will be relatively interesting. It will be interesting to see how those changes,

whether or not they are visible in the court cases. This is a kind of political economy of legal practice to some extent. In all these time periods, to answer your question about the power differentials, we observed that certain groups fare better than their counterparts. These included especially what we call title holders, in particular religious title holders, in particular those people, efendis, and in particular efendis, and they represent the highest echelon of, you know, religious title holders in Kastamonu. And these include, for example, kaddis or judges, former kaddis or, you know, members of the court in particular, and also upper echelons of military title holders, agas, for example.

They are, in fact, the leaders of the military groups in Kastamonu, and they consistently did well against their counterparts with everything else, every other factor held constant. I mean that their gender identity held constant, their religious identity held constant. These were all Muslims, especially? I mean that, you know, their gender identity held constant, their religious identity held constant. These were all Muslims, especially. We know that. But we figured out that that has nothing to do with their religious or gender identity because we were able to isolate those factors.

We also noticed that, you know, those people who held money, you know, who are relatively well, they did relatively well, you know, and who were these people? According to our own observations in probate estate inventories, Terekens detes, you know, these people, you know, usually held the title pilgrim, for example, haji, right? So, in a sense, you know, we saw this relatively clearly. And we also identified the instances in which, you know,

lower echelons of the provincial society held their own, essentially. They were able to resist. And we identified the mechanisms through which, in the court process, they could accomplish that. So what we do in the book is to, first of all, identify who was relatively fortunate in those circumstances and the means through which, the legal mechanisms through which, you know, they were able to accomplish this. You know, the novelty of this is not, you know, necessarily that, you know, we were able to demonstrate this.

The novelty of this is that we were able to demonstrate this with a certain kind of certainty, quantitative certainty. And one thing that's particularly interesting and dear to my heart is, and this is me rather than my co-author, is the class aspect of it, right? And until very recently, it was very difficult to study class, quote-unquote, in the court records. Because, you know, when someone appears in court, that person is not necessarily identified as, you know, a member of a particular class. Of course, there are all these titles. Of course, you know, if we are lucky, we can identify that person's family backgrounds and get an idea about his or her background. But to be able to do that for,

for example, thousands of individuals, it's very difficult just based on the name of it, name of that person or the title of the person. So in order to be able to do this, we had to run a different, a prior analysis. So what we did to be able to identify the class characteristics of, you know, those litigants or disputants is we looked at thousands of estate inventories and identified the monetary value of every title. That means, you know, to what extent agas were wealthier than effendis? To what extent effendis were wealthier than beys? These are what extent, effendis were wealthier than beys. These are all military and religious titles, essentially.

Okay. So you went through these court records. Before we did that. Okay. Before you did that, how did you figure out what their monetary value is? We don't only have court records. We also have estate inventories, terekes. These are the inventories of those people who are deceased. And in these estate inventories, their titles, in titles of the deceased individual and their names are given. So what you can do, this is what we did in fact, look at thousands of these estate inventories all through the 18th century in Kastamonu and try to correlate title with wealth. And to see

to what extent a certain kind of title implied a certain amount of wealth. And whether or not that correlation remained stable over time. So we were able to identify the monetary value in real terms of every title through the 18th century. So we were able to say that, for example, in the 18th century, Efendis were definitely twice as wealthy as Mollas, for example, in the 18th century, Efendis were definitely twice as wealthy as Mollas, for example. We were able to say that Agas were definitely three times as wealthy as Beis.

We were able to say that Efendis and Agas, collectively, were four times as wealthy as someone who did not have a title. So you get some sort of natural class categories. I'm using the term class in quotation marks because obviously, wealth is not the only aspect of class, but it is an indicator. So once you do that, now you have a marker for each litigant who has a title.

Even if you don't know anything about that particular individual, as long as you have an understanding of that person's title, and these are only for males, for men, of course, you can run a class analysis, and then kind of understand the results of the court cases litigations based on the class distributions of those results, right? But, you know, that required a prior analysis to what we did in the court record. So, first, and we do this in the first chapter, in the second chapter of the book, before we start our court cases, this is what we find in the Terra case, in the estate inventories. And we demonstrate this title meant this much of wealth, that title meant that much of wealth. Over time, it remained stable.

So let's use this information to quote these litigants based on their quote-unquote class character. So once you've established their class category, let's say, then you go through the court records and you just, I mean, how do you decide? And then you code them. You know, for example, Mehmet Ağa came to court, right?

Yeah. And sued Nir Efendi, right? So Mehmet Ağa, we know that he's a high-level military title. We code that, okay? Effendi is a high-level religious title. We code that. We code the nature of the dispute. We code that, okay?

We code how that dispute was resolved, whether with this testimony or with certain kind of documentation. We code that that dispute was resolved, whether witness testimony or with certain kind of documentation, we code that. And we do this for every single litigation and sulf, that is, amicable settlement or contract case, within the 10-year time period for three-time years and run the analysis. And we add to this, of course, if Mehmet Ağa was not suing you, but for example, a female, we code that. If a religious person, you know, if a non-Muslim person, we code that. Pardon for this question, which I don't do quantitative analysis, but I was just wondering,

so like, do you just decide, like, how do you decide who wins in a court case? Oh, it's very obvious. It's very obvious. Right. It's obvious in the sense that even if it's not very explicit to say that, whose evidence is counted at the end? And then in most cases, the court says, let so-and-so, an effendi, not intervene in the affairs of so-and-so person.

It becomes very obvious at the end of the court case. And then the result obviously, who wins, who loses. What about these pieces of the court records like probate inventories, like court case right and then the result obviously who wins who loses what about these you know these kind of uh pieces of the court records like probate inventories like uh the creation of an endowment the creation of like um you know some sort of public signing ceremony right which don't are not necessarily disputes right i mean how what do how so where did those end up in your analysis

yeah um actually it's not only disputes that we were interested in, and this is related to the other part of this issue. We were very careful not referring to disputes as litigations, despite the fact that in this podcast, I'm often referring to it casually as litigations. Most disputes did not go to litigations, most disputes did not go to litigations. So what you find in the court records are contracts, amicable settlements, sulh cases, and actual da'wah, right, litigations.

Each and every one of them is either an actual dispute or a potential dispute that's thwarted, that stopped before it became a dispute. Okay. So if you look at them, not necessarily as litigations, but the entire cases of cases resolved in court, okay, you can make certain meaningful distinctions. For example, you can differentiate contracts, which are potential disputes, okay, from actual disputes, which are sulh and litigations. And one of the interesting things, and this is related to the law economics approach that we utilize, is you can see how certain types of litigations or disputes, I'm sorry, are different from potential disputes, which never became dispute according to we know.

So we can compare contracts to sulh and litigations and see what types of potential or actual disputes were resolved beforehand and what types of disputes never became an issue that needed to be resolved by da'wah or sulh. And we also see if there is any kind of distinction among those who participated in the first case of potential disputes compared to those individuals who participated in the second type of actual disputes, that is, sulh or

litigations. Then you can run the same analysis between sulh or amicable settlements and litigations. Assume that we are brothers. Assume that we have a dispute over this room. You claim that it's yours. I claim that it's mine. It's more likely you and I to have that dispute resolved through sulh than take it to court to be resolved. And sulh is amicable settlements.

Amicable settlements. So that piece of analysis is also critical. We did not know much about this. People have speculated about the fact that, for example, disputes that involved family members more often than not were resolved through Suhl. Nobody had demonstrated that was the case. We were able to demonstrate that certain kinds of disputes involving certain types of disputants were resolved, and the female participation representation in them is very interesting, by the way, but you have to read the book for that, are different from the litigations, in fact. And there, you know, the types of disputants in those

litigations are different, the types of disputes are different in those cases. And this, you know, analysis that we conducted in the custom in the court records provide clues about those cases. And this, you know, analysis that we conducted in the custom in the court records provide clues about those too. So these amicable settlements, these are also represented in the court records? Yes, they are. They are. And this is very interesting.

If you look at the literature on disputes, notice I'm not saying litigations, the historiography, the Ottoman history writing on court records, in particular, interested in these types of issues, there is very little emphasis on sulh processes, amicable settlements. Anyone, and including myself until very recently, who worked on legal processes have worked on litigations, right? That's a major issue, because that approach kind of separated a

component of the dispute resolution process from a really important component of it. And those two components have to be taught together. According to modern research and this kind of, you know, relates to law and economics methodology that we appropriated from other fields, is very much premised on the fact that, you know, different components of different dispute resolution process have to be told together, right? It's never, you know, one should not focus on DAWAs or litigations in isolation, because they constitute only 2% to 5% of all the disputes that, you know, that exist in a particular setting. And think about what Aramanas,

including myself, have done until very recently. By focusing on only 2% to 5% of all the disputes that took place in a particular setting, we are misrepresenting the kind of social environment, the conflicts that existed in that particular location, right? By exclusively studying litigations rather than amicable settlements, we are constructing this relatively wrong, not relatively, absolutely wrong understanding kind of the settings that we are supposed to be working. And court records are supposed to be

really close depictions of actual life as it was lived by common men and women. But what we are doing, we are doing is looking at only 2%. And there is no proof that that 2% is representative. Because only certain types of litigations, disputes were, you know, taken to court for litigation. so welcome back to the ottoman history podcast i'm near shafir and i'm talking today with dr about dispute resolution uh justice law and and economics in the Ottoman court system. So we were talking just now about this question of what cases end up in the Ottoman court records. And then it brings up this important question of selection bias,

something which you've dealt with heavily in your research with Metin Coşgel. The basic question is this, is that throughout society there's a variety of different disputes that come up. Only very few of them end up in the court records. There's all sorts of different ways of resolving disputes,

but there's also different legal venues such as the Divan in Istanbul, which people can send their disputes to there for resolution. So how do we know, how do we figure out, how do we get past this issue of selection? How do we know that the cases represented in the court system are in any way representative of society as a whole?

It's a major issue. It's an issue that hasn't been tackled before in any kind of systematic or analytical manner.led before in any kind of, you know, systematic or analytical manner. Of course, we know that, you know, and historians have mentioned about the fact that certain types of cases never came to court.

Certain types of disputes among certain types of, you know, disputants never appeared in court. Right. So this is, I mean, for instance, for example, Leslie Pierce has argued in her study of Eintub that the rich, the elites, never actually used the court system.

It was always a site of contention for the lower classes. Right. So the issue is, you know, to identify in a relatively reliable fashion what types of disputes were taken to court for the resolution, and either what types of cases were resolved in court through other methods of resolution, such as amicable settlements, or were not at all taken to court and resolved somewhere else. For the latter part, the last group of disputes, we have no basis of information, right? Some historians have claimed to identify, for example, the notebooks of governors or sub-governors in which there are mentions of certain kind of disputes that were resolved in their presence, in their own residences. But we don't have many of those kind of ledgers.

So what we have, what we can answer right now is we can compare the litigations that we have in the court records to the amicable settlementsations that we have in the court records to the amicable settlements that we also have in the court records. So what we can do is, through a systematic analytical analysis, is whether or not there are certain kinds of disputes that will rather result through settlements or litigations, or to what extent certain types of disputants are more inclined to resolve their disputes through settlement rather than litigation. It might have been, or to what extent certain cadets, in fact, more inclined to push resolution through settlement than litigation. So by studying those kind of differentials,

inclinations, or tendencies among different forms of dispute resolution, we can develop a much better understanding, more complex understanding of the ways in which those disputes were resolved in our settings, and also a better understanding of what types of disputes existed in specific settings. Are there any concrete examples from your research? For example, you know, females, or disputes that were initiated by females, especially against higher-level powerholders,

were more inclined to be resolved through settlements. There must be certain kind of reasons for that, which we speculate on in our book. We have to understand the fact, this is a point that I can't emphasize. I cannot emphasize more. What we find in litigations is, in fact, a misrepresentation of the types of conflicts that existed in court. So without a systematic analysis of all these disputes, including settlements, we cannot necessarily understand what took place in court at the daily level. Right. So you've been talking, you've made several references to this law and economics approach

throughout the podcast, throughout the interview. Can you just tell us a bit more? Because you see it as this kind of solution, this methodology is a solution to many of the problems that have kind of plagued? Rather than solution, I would say that this is what we find in the Low-End Economic Scholarship, which developed in Western settings, especially in the United States, U.S. legal scholarship, is in fact a methodology, is a way of kind of finding answers or offering hypotheses to the kind of questions that we have been talking about here.

It is essentially an approach that developed in 1960s and initially very much influenced by neoclassical kind of assumptions about individual behavior. And the reason that it's called law and economics approach is very much related to the fact that it takes as the center of analysis this individual who calculates his or her options in specific bounded settings and makes assumptions, acts in a certain way based on these calculations. Now, that individual doesn't have to be rational in the way that neoclassical economists assume it. But the law and economics approach assumes that that individual does have a bounded rationality, which all the imperfections that we always have

in terms of the basis of knowledge, our limitations, so on and so forth. So it is a relatively useful, it's a very useful methodological approach for the kind of issues that we are interested in because it provides models to follow, you know, provides hypotheses to test, right, in the Ottoman setting that haven't been tested before. You know, the particular model that we adopt by using our book is called

as Priest and Klein model. This is a model that was developed in 1980s, and it's a model that kind of addresses two essential questions, okay? What types of cases go to litigation? That's the first question. And who wins and who loses that case? Plaintiffs or defendants, okay? The model assumes that everything is held constant. Only those cases that cannot be settled through amicable settlements, or what we call suh in the Arab context, go to litigation. And those cases tend to be cases that are relatively difficult to settle before the court, resolve before the court. For example, if it's obvious that my dispute between you and me, you are in the right, I'm in the wrong, we don't go to litigation because you know how it will be resolved when we go to court and I know how it will be resolved when it goes to court. But if it is difficult to decide for you or for me, we take those kinds of cases to court. And more likely than not that,

you know, those kinds of cases, at the end of the day, 50% of them will be resolved for the defendant and 50% will be resolved for the plaintiff. So there is this 50% rule, which kind of assumes that, you know, at the end of a year, for example, the courts will decide 50% of the time for plaintiffs and 50% of the time, you know, for defendants. Okay? That's a relatively useful rule time, you know, for defendants. Okay? That's a relatively useful rule because, you know, it is very much based on the assumption that, you know,

assumes that, you know, both defendants and plaintiffs actively participate in the decision-making process. And the defendant, as much as the plaintiff, has a volution in the process. For example, if you, as a defendant, can, you know, presume that, you know, the case will be resolved on my behalf, for me, you can just give in, accept a settlement that I offer you, or you can offer me a settlement, and that case is out of the court, okay? So, in a sense, we see

this to some extent in the Ottoman cases, about 47, 45 to 45, you% of the cases result in Ottoman courts, in Kastamonu at least, for plaintiff. But at the same time, the model also assumes that certain types of cases, there are factors that affect the plaintiff win rate and therefore the defendant win rate, right? For example, if you have better knowledge of the law, better knowledge of the legal system, better access to sources and resources, better influence on the court's operatives or functionaries, it is more likely to predict the result of the case, okay? And then withdraw from the litigation process if you decide through those mediums

that it will be resolved against you and settle the case. And you, as a better informed party, okay, will only enter litigations in those cases that you, more accurately than me, predict to be victorious. Therefore, your win rate will be higher than mine. Yeah. Okay? Or perhaps, if I have more to lose by losing a case than you to win by winning that case, I will be much more hesitant to accept that litigation and much more willing to settle

the case by offering you a relatively general settlement terms. For example, this is an example that I gave before. The cases between individuals and pharmaceutical companies. Those pharmaceutical companies are relatively hesitant to take on litigations and more inclined to settle cases because they know that if they lose their cases, their losses will be much more higher than the wins of the plaintiffs because those cases will initiate

a series of other litigations against them. They have to protect their repetitions. And therefore, they are very careful about choosing the cases that they want to litigate. Therefore, their plaintiffs' rates are high. So those instances affect the 50% plaintiff win, therefore 50% defendant rate cases. So think about these cases, scenarios in the

Ottoman context. Power holders, they will have reputational concerns. If they think that if they are going to lose a case against a peasant, let's say, they have a way to, or they may be much more inclined to offer the peasant a settlement. And only litigate those cases they have a higher propensity to win. Therefore, their plaintiff win rates, their win rates will be higher than the peasants, okay? Or think about, for example,

differential stakes, their ability to predict, you know, a court case before the court case is resulted. We can make certain kind of assumptions about man and woman too. Therefore, the kind of differentials that we identify in the court cases

could be very much related to all these hypotheses that have been tested in law and economic scholarship in the Western context. This is important. Why? And this goes back to the beginning of our discussion. I told you that I'm interested in class performances. Not many historians have told us why we should expect the powerful people

should win in the Ottoman context. How they would win in the Ottoman context. Or not many people have told us why we should expect the peasants and women have a means to stand against more powerful opponents. There are no theories out there to explain to us why certain parties, why certain groups, why certain litigants win and why certain ones lose. Law and economics scholarship, at some level, gives us the terminology to employ, conceptual

tools to apply in our cases, okay? And hypotheses to test. And if those hypotheses are, you know, fail to provide the results, you know, that's fine. But, you know, now we have a framework to think through issues. And that issue is important, you know, that this methodological, you know, conceptual tools are very important for us. If we want to really understand why certain groups, why certain groups, you know, participate in certain ways and whether or not they win or lose. I mean, this has been quite fascinating.

So basically what you've been arguing against is this notion that the Ottoman court system is this kind of equal arena of justice to a certain degree, at least ideologically. Yes. And that's what you found out is that essentially that the, perhaps not surprisingly, is that essentially that perhaps

not surprisingly is that the power holders, people, whether with more money or with religious title or land and things like that, essentially end up

coming out on top in most of these court cases and that the courts are actually much like, let's say, 21st century America

quite stacked in favor of those who already have economic and political power. I began my research with this kind of inclination as a reaction to this very prevalent assumption that courts were fair in general, right? They serve this ideological function of legitimizing the polity, essentially. And I will come back to this because it has changed. My standing is now certain types of questions

are more interesting. That is a historical orientation to start to initiate the question that way. I think let's look at what evidence tells us, what we find in court records and try to understand based on that, whatever there is in terms of the operations of the courts. One of the things that law and economics scholars insist on is this plaintiff win rate or defendant

win rate is independent from the political inclinations of the court. Because if you and I, living in 18th century Kastamonu, you are a peasant, I am an aga. If you know, and I know, that the court is going to act in a certain way, why would we take our case to court? If you know that, for example, the court is going to favor the aga, you will just agree my settlement. You know, you know that, not only that you will have to pay for the court, but the case will be resolved against you, right?

So, low-income people that, you know, all these things that, you know, the Ottomans have said about Ottoman courts, how fair they are. And in fact, Haim Gerber made that argument. Right. Haim Gerber said that Ottoman courts are so fair, you know, they result, you know, more often than not on the part of the four, you know, decided cases for common people, for the weak, women, non-Muslims.

If that's the case, and assuming that, you know, clients, litigants knew more about the courts than we do know, how do we explain the fact that they went to court? Yeah. So, we cannot start, initiate the process with that assumption, right? We have to run the numbers. We have to conduct the analysis. And whatever we find, you know, we have to interpret that finding and develop kind of an understanding of the operations of Ardham course based on that. Law and economic scholarship say that, you know, the court results or, you know, the overall results, plaintiff win rates

or defendant rates are independent of court's inclinations. And I think that makes sense to me. So one last thing, which is, so having done, you know, kind of done some of this initial quantitative research, kind of looking at these court records in this new way, what do you think are the questions that we can ask in the future if we do further analysis? What can we pull out? We have to make inter-regional comparisons, right? Research on 17th and 18th century customary is not adequate. You know, and this is something that's also related to other types of research that I've

conducted. For example, let's remember the kind of, you know, this analysis that I conducted by using estate inventories. You know, I made certain correlations between titles and wealth levels, right? To what extent those correlations, you know, hold in different settings? To what extent they change over time, okay? And we can apply the same question, you know, to what extent what we found in Kastamonu correlates to, you know, Bursa in 18th century, right? Or Trabzon in 18th century, or Aleppo in 18th century, right? That will be fascinating. So, you know, in fact, that has to be a collaborative project, though. You know,

if we can develop, agree on a methodological orientation, then we can hope that eventually we can provide more comprehensive answers about Ottoman justice, something we still don't know much about. Well, on that, we will end it. We've had a wonderful discussion about Ottoman justice, about the court systems, and who triumphs, who loses, and how we should go about studying that. So once again, I'd like to thank our guest, Dr. Boc Ergenen. Thank you very much. He and Metin Coşgel have a new book coming out in the near future called The Economics of Ottoman Justice. And for those of you that would like to know more,

go to the website where you can find a short bibliography of relevant sources where you can read all about Ottoman courts and laws. And for those of you that would like to be part of a greater Ottoman history podcast community, please go to our Facebook page, join the discussion there, and we look forward to having you tune in to our next podcast episode thank you Eze santour di-la-diat a-bendez. Titulky vytvořil JohnyX.