Court pleadings are filed on your behalf by your attorney, so you can’t get in trouble for their content. Your attorney can, I think.
Think about it this way: while there are cases where both parties genuinely believe they’re in the right, there are an awful lot of civil suits where one side or the other is lying. Sometimes people have to build their entire case (or defense) around lying.
ETA: In any case, it’s extremely difficult to prove willful fraud or misrepresentation. Ignorance of the law is no excuse in criminal proceedings, but ignorance period is a very good excuse in civil ones.
So, if I file a lawsuit saying that Really Not All That Bright did on August 24, 2009 at 10:49am Eastern time come to my place of work and did physically assault me and call me names, and after everything comes out I admit that I made the whole thing up, I didn’t break any criminal law by filing a statement with a court that I knew was 100% false?
Again, the complaint is not your statement, strictly speaking. If my attorney deposed you, and you said the same thing again under oath, then you’d be in trouble. That said, at least in Florida, it’s virtually impossible to get the state attorney to actually charge you with anything in that sort of scenario unless they’re presented with a fait accompli- ie. I/my lawyers gather all the evidence for them and hand it to them on a plate with watercress around it.
I would almost certainly file a counter-claim, though- assuming that (1) I didn’t actually beat you up and call you Nancy, and (2) you had any assets worth going after.
Once again, it’s not a crime to file a frivolous lawsuit. Why should it be? All you’re doing is asking for money. It’s possible to countersue for something like defamation, but that’s still a civil complaint, not a criminal one.
If you file a frivolous case and lose you can be required to pay the other person’s court costs, and if you make a habit of it, the court can tell you they will not be bothering with your filings anymore. ETA: And of course you can always be countersued. Beyond that I think we’d need a lawyer to answer this.
FTR, you can be criminally penalized for frivolous claims made in US Tax Courts. Well, frivolous arguments, since you don’t make claims in tax court as far as I’m aware.
I only bring that up since jtgain mentioned bankruptcy filings.
There are civil remedies for that. Would you really want to swamp an already greatly overburdened criminal system with prosecutions for frivolous lawsuits? Would you really want to put people in a position where they would have to be afraid of trying to sue powerful individuals or corporations for fear of criminal repercussions?
There’s malicious prosecution/abuse of process, but you have to go through the suit, have it resolved in your favor, and prove that the person filing it did so with intent to mess with you (that’s a legal term).
And the penalties there are still civil. Nobody goes to jail.