Rule 11 sanctions were almost never invoked despite rampant frivolous litigation.

Evidence

In his nine years on the federal bench, no lawyer had ever brought a Rule 11 motion in his courtroom, nor did he know of any other judge in the First Circuit who had heard such a motion. Skinner felt that there were a lot of worthless cases—“junk,” he once called them—clogging the federal docket and contributing to his own immense caseload. He knew about the proposed revisions to the rule, and he thought them an excellent idea. In his opinion, lawyers should be encouraged to use Rule 11 much more often. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 461

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the reader’s pattern of formal institutions that exist on paper but go unused in practice — dormant sanctions, unused procedures — as with Rule 11’s near-total non-application before its revision.
• QUESTION: Why do written procedural safeguards go unused until someone with authority actively pushes them? Worth chasing as a general mechanism.