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.
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
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.
it’s left over from the american cultural revolution of the 1950s
One major difference is that Romania is much more racially homogenous than America.
The legal system in the States is descended from the chattel slavery era (similar to Romania), but America also is obsessed with prosperity gospel from Evangelical Christianity. When you combine these 2 factors, you get a system where anytime a conflict happens, you have no community resolution to rely upon. Anyone who can’t enact justice on their own is seen as weak, that’s why you see so many school shootings happen. I’d say they’re not only a symptom of white supremacy but also of collapsed social cohesion.
Sure, America is definitely more litigious but that’s kinda what happens when you don’t have legislation for tenant rights, labor rights, healthcare, racial justice, etc. Your only options left are to either pay a lawyer if you’re privileged enough, take matters into your own hands or seek a communal solution.
Communal solutions are very unlikely to be pursued in a state that despises social welfare solutions to social problems. During FDR’s presidency, America was seen as the golden age of American history due to better than usual material conditions at the expense of non-white people being excluded from these welfare programs. Thus, the “welfare queen” stereotype was created to demonize Black women simply for wanting to enjoy the same level of prosperity that their white counterparts were. You can see a similar pattern of violence emerging in the EU when white people invent a “white replacement” myth as soon as white people drop below 90% in a given neighborhood. Said neighborhood gets labeled as a “refugee hellscape” and gets segregated from mainstream society as to not infect “the civilized white culture”. You also see this manifesting in Romania as “lawless”(according to white society) Romani ghettos that are systemically segregated from mainstream society. Romani people having no choice but to rely on internal solutions get labeled as barbaric, white Romanians doing the same thing get called heroes.
Courts everywhere are much more likely to side with the abuser, what America does a bit differently is that they industrialize their police force to lock up as many people as possible since that keeps the existing hierarchies in place. Romania is more keen on sweeping violence under the rug because that way it’s cheaper to rely on local mobs of men against women, whites against Romani, rich vs poor, etc. to uphold the police state. There’s also the fact that the Romanian state is more corrupt in a not wanting to enforce laws way and they benefit from receiving bribes or turning the other way when a problem is brought up.
TLDR: poverty and racism means you can’t afford to be litigious. It’s mostly middle class and higher white people in both countries who enjoy the privilege of being litigious. Even the poor white people who wanna sue end up bankrupt from legal fees or have to crowdfund for legal costs.
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.
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 to super giants to fight it out to figure out who’s right.
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.
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
I’ve heard various explanations, I don’t know how accurate the following is. I’d be interested to learn more:
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the very earliest colony settlements had to bargain hard and with precision in order to survive. It began a contractual culture that eventually extended into litigation
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due to high immigration from many differing backgrounds, disputes had to be settled in litigation rather than relying on social understanding
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the religious culture was largely inherited from the Puritans who had a legalistic and inflexible reading of the new testament. (This unwillingness to compromise is why they were persecuted in Europe and fled to the new world)
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the American identity is ‘invented’ (in the sense that’s it’s an abrupt mixing of many old world cultures) and so national identity was initially based on cerebral activities (the Constitution, Bill of Rights) rather than evolved from a very long history of social bonds found in old world ‘nations’. This required a cerebral precision to be at the heart of identity which easily extended to legal rights and relations
As I say, take with a pinch of salt. But this is the gist of what I’ve heard from people who know more than me.
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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.
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.
This is mostly for white Americans. No minority would willingly call the police especially if they’re African Americans.
Believe it or not, most civil cases don’t start with calling the police.
they have a great point though because the courts are simply an extension of the police state. these are the same courts that are more likely to give a harsher sentence to Black men than their white counterparts. From the USSC:
Black male offenders continued to receive longer sentences than similarly situated White male offenders. Black male offenders received sentences on average 19.1 percent longer than similarly situated White male offenders
