Legal adaptation among Vietanmese refugees in the United States: How international migrants litigate civil grievances during the resettlement process

This article examines an overlooked dimension of adaptation among internati onal migrants: how they use the host society's legal system to seek redress for grievances that arise during the resettlement process. The article ter ms this process legal adaptation and focuses on foreign-born plaintiffs in civil litigation. A sample (N=137) of state and Federal civil cases with at least one Vietnamese litigant is used to analyze the temporal patterns in legal adaptation among Vietnamese refugees from 1975 to 1994. Several aspec ts of Vietnamese litigation match their macro-level resettlement process, s uch as civil rights and intraethnic litigation occurring later than other t ypes of cases. But civil suits with a Vietnamese plaintiff and a native def endant tended to occur earlier than civil suits with a native plaintiff and a Vietnamese defendant. The article identifies the role of legal organizat ions and international grievances as the sources of Vietnamese refugees' ra pid legal adaptation.