Asking as a Romanian, I’m genuinely curious. In my almost 32 years of life, I’ve never had any experiences with police / courts and either have the people around me. Here the philosophy is you avoid the police / court system like the plague and deal with problems interpersonally. The less the government / government agencies in your life, the best. But Americans seem to be the complete opposite: “lawsuit waiting to happen”, “sue them”, “call the police”, “contact X governmental agency”, etc. these are all things I see online. I just don’t understand why you’d want all of that in your life, it’s like inviting trouble + waste of time and money.
While it’s true we’re a very litigious country, it’s also a meme that blows the reality out of proportion. In my circle of friends and family, the only lawsuits have been insurance related (car accidents, etc), or financial stuff (sued by a corporation for not paying a debt, suing employer for unpaid wages, etc). All of that is pretty standard stuff.
I’ve never met or heard of anyone near my circle who has sued another person over some personal issue/grievance. If you run over someone’s foot with a shopping cart at the supermarket, you’re more likely to get into a fist fight (or a shoot out) than a lawsuit.
waste of time and money
Well, the legal system here is relatively efficient, and if you do decide to take someone to court and win, there’s a good chance it’ll be worth it. If anything, the large number of lawsuits is a testament to how well the legal system works. If it didn’t, people wouldn’t use it so often.
You can bring a stupid frivolous lawsuit intended to waste everyone’s time and money, but those can get dismissed quickly.
Here is a list of the top 5 most litigious countries by capita:
- Germany: 123.2/1,000 2. Sweden: 111.2/1,000 3. Israel: 96.8/1,000 4. Austria: 95.9/1,000 5. U.S.: 74.5/1,000. The Top 10 also includes the UK (64.4); Denmark (62.5); Hungary (52.4); Portugal (40.7); and France (40.3).
In comparison to most of Europe, America is very unsafe, gun ownership is much higher, and mental healthcare is a joke.
This means that you do not engage in a dispute with a stranger because they might be unhinged and just kill you over a parking space or who gets to merge first in traffic or whatever.
That’s how the system is set up: It’s fucked, but often times suing is the only chance at getting any real restitution. Our protections suck, so companies can kinda do whatever and often get away with it.
Americans aren’t actually that litigious. This perception was created as part of a public misinformation campaign by McDonalds to try to win sympathy when they made their coffee way hotter than it should have ever been, and were sued when a customer had their labia fused together when the coffee spilled in their lap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald’s_Restaurants
Not just McDonald’s, it’s been used by numerous organizations to downplay lawsuits they feel will hurt them with consumers. Tort reform is also trotted out by politicians who want to look as though they’re protecting people from “government overreach” because they know people don’t know what torts are and they can scare them into believing they’re going to be sued if they don’t get outside to shovel their walk early enough after a snow.
Not so. America produces a staggering number of lawyers by population each year. This has been the case decades before the coffee thing.
This is an america vs Americans definition issue. Americans litigate when its useful or required usually. America litigates every chance it gets. The mish derstanding is easy as america is full of Americans, but really america is a collection of wealth holding entities known as corporations that give zero shits about Americans except for when it comes to extracting wealth.
Of course there are a lot of Americans that participate in this cause those corporations pay to put food on the table. You too will dance when your corporate overlords snap.
/thread
Threat of a lawsuit is not a lawsuit.
What happens commonly is the threat of legal liability is used as a tool to gain some kind of leverage or compliance.
In business this is very prominent practice of utilizing capital to suppress competition. Inserting trouble + waste of time and money into your competition is very American.
Because if Americans tried to solve things personally someone would always end up dead
lmao, this is morbidly on point
more like white Americans
Enough with the racism.
I wish “enough with the racism” would be said as readily and fiercely about actual racism.
Hey
Hey buddy
Learn how racism works
Well thats the gov which did massacre everyone in gaza NOT americans
They aren’t!
Two things:
1: Americans are not actually very litigious relative to other countries, what you’re referring to is a culture projected by corporate interests violating the rights of individual Americans, interests invested in telling American citizens that they are too litigious, resulting in citizens who will therefore abstain from legally defending their rights when those rights are violated, which is happening constantly and to a degree that Americans should be far more litigious than they are.
2: legal advertising became legal less than 50 years ago in the United States, because it’s obviously unethical and societally harmful. at this point, legal advertising is basically unregulated in the US.
Because The US allows legal commercials and advertisements on billboards and very importantly, American culture is the salient exported culture globally, lawsuits seem wider spread in the US and US culture than they actually are.
Because the US is a common law country, and most of Europe are civil law countries. In common law countries punitive damages are possible from torts, whereas in civil law countries they largely aren’t
In general rule of law worked and was effective for decades. It was a way of balancing power between the various parts of society. As well it held government accountable to some extent.
In the future we will see less and less of this as they systems have been grinding down for decades now.
One contributing factor is how our insurance system works. If someone gets injured on my property, my insurance company will sue and I don’t have any control over that. It’s a system designed for money’d super giants to fight it out to figure out who’s right.
A large part of it is our broken medical system. If you slip on something at a store and break a bone, you could be out 10s of thousands if uninsured. The only way you don’t lose everything you own is to sue the store where you slipped.
Lawsuits? Not on my watch. It’s why I own a musket for home defense, since that’s what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. “What the devil?” As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he’s dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it’s smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, “Tally ho lads” the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up, Just as the founding fathers intended.
I had a chat with my American relatives at one point which began with me asking why it seems medical malpractice suits have such soaring high settlements compared to where I am in Canada? They explained it to me like this. Say a botched procedure leaves you requiring constant medical treatments for the rest of your life. You have to sue for any treatments you would otherwise have to pay out of pocket. Where you have a public healthcare system, the state would cover that. You may still sue for loss of employment if you are no longer able to work, say, but settlements tend to be orders of magnitude higher because of those additional costs. Unfortunately, this leads to a proliferation of bottom-feeding personal injury lawyers who try to get you to litigate and overstate your injuries to get bigger settlements.
