The overlords of Tokugawa Japan, as elsewhere, asserted its authority through adjudication. With a modest aim of narrating the way the bakufu coped with the growing demands for judicial remedy, this essay seeks to review the basic layout of Tokugawa civil suits and the governing principles on their discriminatory treatment at courts. As has been explored in secondary literature, the official gradation of claims was fraught with forbiddingly cumbersome structural impediments against litigation, especially those involving unpaid loans. Instead of single‐mindedly favoring certain “feudal” class interests, nevertheless, the bakufu seems to have been well aware of the practical exigency of judicial enforcement in monetary matters. The source of conflict in the second half of the Tokugawa period tends to be identified in the context of “proto‐industrialization”: as a consequence of expanding commercial transactions, it is often proposed, interpersonal relations became increasingly adversarial. Whether the records of civil disputes bear out that proposition seems debatable, however. The rising lawsuits over money, as more traditional explanations would have it, may have largely reflected a general economic distress and the rampant delinquency of the samurai over whose behavior the bakufu apparently had only a limited power.