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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
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Submitted 1 day ago by slug_esqe@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 1 day ago
HappySkullsplitter@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Because if Americans tried to solve things personally someone would always end up dead
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
lmao, this is morbidly on point
Lilith@ponder.cat 23 hours ago
Well thats the gov which did massacred everyone in gaza NOT americans
Varyk@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
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.
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.
RBWells@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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).
IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
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.
scoobford@lemmy.zip 19 hours ago
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.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 23 hours ago
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.
ZombiFrancis@sh.itjust.works 22 hours ago
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.
gamer@lemm.ee 19 hours ago
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.
CM400@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t think most Americans are, but there are certainly enough to make an industry around it…
The thing is, though, if you slip and fall (or whatever else) on the property of a big corporation or at least one insured by a big corporation, and you hire a good enough lawyer, you can sue for way more money than you could earn in your lifetime. Granted, those kinds of successes are the exception and not the rule, but it happens often enough to keep people trying in hopes that they won’t ever have to work again.
nalinna@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Pure conjecture here, but I certainly do wonder if the number of lawsuits would decrease if healthcare wasn’t cost-prohibitive to people. I don’t expect they’d go away entirely (legitimate grievances, greed, etc), but I imagine they’d probably go down quite a bit if people didn’t have to wonder how to pay rent and pay to have their broken leg treated.
blackbelt352@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Personal injury lawyers might not be as big as they are, but lawsuits in the US are kind of important for more than just monetary compensation, it’s to have case law and in essence introduce new regulations. McDonalds didn’t just have to pay medical bills for the Hot Coffee lawsuit, but McDonalds also had to change how they serve their coffee. Its part compensation and part making sure it doesn’t happen again or if it does, there is a clear path for what needs to happen. As awful as it is to have something bad happen, it’s worse if we don’t learn and change from it and our system of incorporating case law is pretty decent at that, if imperfect. No legal system can cover every scenario, but if it can adapt as new scenarios arise then it is all the more resilient (although that does kinda assume our Judiciary is truly impartial and there are no cronies trained by think tanks to give the illusion of impartiality)
DeathsEmbrace@lemm.ee 1 day ago
This is mostly for white Americans. No minority would willingly call the police especially if they’re African Americans.
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
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.
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 23 hours ago
I work at a company that often gets threatened to be sued by entitled white people. The important thing to remember is that these dumbass Americans have no idea how their legal system works.
What typically happens, in my experience, is an entitled white dumbass takes issue with a rule or requirement they were told but ignored. They’ll make a big grandstanding show of threatening the lawsuit, because they think if they look scary enough you’ll give them whatever they wanted. Then they’ll get to the lawyers, who without fail will explain to them how they have no legal grounds for a case. Sometimes, if the dumbass is exceptionally entitled, they’ll even shop around a few law firms trying to find anyone to take the case. Eventually, we just stop hearing about these people, because they give up on trying to sue us. They’re all talk and no bite.
Lilith@ponder.cat 23 hours ago
Americans arent dumbass And the thing you meant is obviously not the case Not all white people are bad mr racist The dumbass one is that imperialist gov
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 hours ago
This comment really doesn’t help your case. The race is notable because minorities in the U.S. have not engaged in this sort of behavior against us. I imagine it’s because they’re more used to the law being antagonistic against them, or because they come from other countries like OP where the law isn’t traditionally threatened in such a frivolous manner. I’m calling out a very specific kind of American, which I think anyone whose worked customer service in the U.S. knows very well.
amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone 22 hours ago
you can’t be racist against white people since we invented racism
5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 hours ago
Not all white people are bad
Are you sure, that is your phrasing?
henfredemars@infosec.pub 22 hours ago
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.
nutsack@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
it’s left over from the american cultural revolution of the 1950s
MelonYellow@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
tunetardis@lemmy.ca 21 hours ago
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.
FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
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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Retro_unlimited@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
I think it’s more the lawyers greed. They have billboards everywhere.
Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
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.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaura…
Awkwardly_Frank@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
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.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
Not so. America produces a staggering number of lawyers by population each year. This has been the case decades before the coffee thing.
Baaahb@feddit.nl 20 hours ago
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.
pimento64@sopuli.xyz 23 hours ago
/thread