The Jan. 6 thread is off on a tangent involving frivolous lawsuits. This sparked a question: Is one of the reasons the US has 2/3 of the world’s lawyers because as a “melting pot” we lack the cultural pathways to avoid such things? Is the easily found evidence that shows that the more transient and/or multicultural an area is, the higher the number of lawsuits? Are there areas where there is little movement, and people have worked out cultural ways to settle disputes that don’t involve the law? (Relatives mediate, the church mediates, mortal combat, whatever).
It just occurred to me that we sue because we have no other pathway forward.
Valid idea, or should I back off the recreational crack?
(Modes, feel free to drop this wherever you see fit.)
Personally, i think the reason we have more liability lawyers and lawsuits is because we don’t have socialized medicine. So if someone is badly hurt, they desperately need massive amounts of cash, and finding someone else to be liable (preferably someone with liability insurance) is a good way to do that.
I work in the property/casually insurance industry. I’ve seen one parent sue the other after an auto accident to get money to pay for the child’s care. It wasn’t because they “lacked cultural pathways”, it was because the kid was hurt and their health insurance was inadequate to properly care for the kid.
I don’t know if we have more contract lawyers, or estate lawyers, etc. than other countries, but i doubt it.
I’m a lawyer in a country that has single-payer medicine, with a cap on non-pecuniary losses (pain and suffering), and in a province that has no-fault insurance, and no-fault workers’ compensation.
Personal injury lawsuits are not common. You can still sue for pecuniary losses, like if as a result of the injury you can’t carry out certain career paths so have a claim for long-term loss of income, or you’ve had a permanent injury requiring special care, etc, but the big, common, claims for medical bills, like in the States, are just non-existent.
That affects the bar as a whole, in my opinion.
There may be other factors in play, such as the dual state/federal court system you have that encourages forum-shopping, but that’s much more speculative. Our provincial courts are courts of general jurisdiction, and the federal courts have very narrow jurisdiction, compared to the US federal system, so there’s little incentive to try to move a case around; compared to the US system, it’s extremely difficult to do so, in fact.
Plus costs. Loser pays. It’s not full indemnity to the other side, but going into a civil case knowing that if you lose, you pay your lawyer, and contribute to the other side’s costs as well, can tend to focus the mind a bit.
Contingency fees are allowed, but are heavily regulated by the law societies. And, contingency fees don’t eliminate the possibility of costs if you lose.
Tommy Douglas, former Premier of Saskatchewan, used to say: “Any time you hear someone say, ‘It’s not the money, it’s the principle’, you know that it’s about the money.”
re state-federal court forum issues: I was talking with a group of 1st year law students in the US once and they were going on about the diversity section of their civil pro class, Erie doctrine, and how complicated it was. I got curious and asked one of them to let me have their textbook.
I paged through it, then pinched together about a quarter of the pages in the text and said: “This is unique to the US. Common law students in other countries like Britain and Canada don’t have to learn anything like this, because it doesn’t exist in our countries.”
From the expressions on their faces, they weren’t reassured by this little bit of comparative law.
Generally when I here someone blame “melting pot” for problems, it’s often because that person is a racist.
I don’t know the actual answer to the OP’s question, but some things to consider:
The US has the worlds largest, wealthiest economy. Many of these lawyers are involved in corporate law, finance, contracts, patents, IP, and other matters not related to personal injury or criminal law.
Lawyers tend to get paid very well in the USA. So there is a strong incentive to make more of them.
A lot of Americans are just selfish entitled boorish stupid jerks. So they tend to act in ways that lack consideration for other people and are prone to not handle disputes well within their own subculture, let alone interacting with other cultures.
In many other countries, the path to “settle disputes” might simply be “shut up and do as you’re told”.
I think it’s unlikely that people in the US are significantly greedier than people elsewhere. That seems like a universal human emotion to me. Maybe it’s less socially acceptable to display it elsewhere?
"The town which can’t support one lawyer can always support two lawyers” was said by President Lyndon B. Johnson at the swearing in of his attorney general and deputy attorney general on February 13, 1965.
America didn’t have hundreds of years of precedents, or a strong set of national laws. It was full of brand new towns, and a system of federal, state, and local laws that nobody really understood. It allowed people to declare themselves lawyers with little to no actual learning who thereupon desperately needed to make a living. It also a plethora of elected officials at all levels who needed some legal understanding to write the millions of new laws a new country needed. And it set up a culture in which people were told they were equals in a court of law. It was a unique spawning ground.
Both of these things are true. When you have the world’s financial centre in New York, you will need lots of lawyers. However, I don’t think those drive the type of litigation that the OP is thinking of.
I think it would be useful to start by looking up some stats on the breakdown of lawyers by the type of work they do. My now-deceased first wife was a licensed attorney in 3 states and practiced for nearly 40 years. And in that career filed or answered exactly zero lawsuits. She was far from unique in that.
The OP essentially assumes all (or almost all) lawyers are civil plaintiffs’ attorneys then runs off on that tangent.
Here’s another issue not exactly unique to the USA, but fairly uncommon around the world. Up until the last 20-ish years and the continuous RW assault on the judiciary, the US court system at the federal and most state levels was well-resourced. You could file a civil action and have it heard that year. If you were involved in a criminal matter, you’d get a reasonably prompt start to your trial and a reasonably speedy conclusion. Plus timely appeals hearings.
By contrast, a case filed in an Italian or Indian court might get scheduled for initial hearing a decade from now. If it’s scheduled at all. As a consequence, civil law has all but ceased to function. And so litigators are sort of out of business. Lawyers still draft contracts and businessmen still sign them, but if something goes wrong, the one place they don’t turn to is the courts.
One factor, not independent of other already mentioned, is that the US is particularly individualistic. Some of the stuff Americans sue about, other countries may have collective solutions to.
Yes. For example, in Canada, the percentage of foreign-born is just shy of 25% the total population, according to StatsCan:
In 2021, more than 8.3 million people, or almost one-quarter (23.0%) of the population, were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada.
In the United States, the percentage of foreign-born is 14%, according to the American Immigration Council:
The United States was built, in part, by immigrants—and the nation has long been the beneficiary of the new energy and ingenuity that immigrants bring. Today, 14 percent of the nation’s residents are foreign-born, over half of whom are naturalized U.S. citizens.
We also have a province where half the population speaks French only, and nationally, 12.6% of the population speak French only. That is a type of diversity that as far as I know doesn’t exist in the United States.
Is there a difference between the percentage of cases in the US and Canada that are settled by arbitration or other similar means before going to court?
I don’t know of any stats about that, but it would be hard to tell, I would think, because arbitrations are often completely private, as a matter of contract between the parties. For purely private arbitration, there’s no reporting requirement, at least as far as I know. But with 10 provinces and 50 states, there could be considerable variation.
IIRC there was another thread recently that touched on this topic. It was mentioned that getting legislation passed in the areas of product safety, workplace safety, environmental regulations, etc. is more difficult in the US compared to other Western countries. Compared to countries in Europe, we end up having to go the route of “legislating by the judiciary” due to this.
I can’t recall the exact topic, but this was definitely brought up about a month ago.
