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.

  • CM400@lemmy.world
    0·
    11 days 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
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      11 days 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
        0·
        11 days 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)