Vexatious Litigation: A Refreshing Message from Michigan

Indian courts have always exercised an inherent power to levy a fine on aggressive litigation. A page could be taken from a US judgment where strictures were passed on the “profound abuse of the judicial process”

- Upendra Baxi

NOT too much of reflection and research have guided us in judicial sanctioning of egregious excesses of vexatious litigation. Most societies and legal cultures have enacted legislations by defining and punishing it (mostly through damages) as instances of “annoying”, “habitual”, “unreasonable” and even “aggressive litigation”. But psychiatrists have long studied “litigious insanity”—or “Querulanten wa hnsinn”, so named by German psychologist Johann Ludwig Casper in 1857 (among others) as a kind of paranoia in which the patient is engulfed by a delusion where she believes that her legal entitlement to sue for legal damages has been violated and is determined to pursue an imaginary justice. Querlos paranoia is not a term used by common lawyers and judges. It continues even today as a vexed area of interface among law, medicine and psychiatry.1