Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: Public discussion of our civil justice system resounds with a litany of quarter-truths: America is the most litigious society in the course of all human history; Americans sue at the drop of a hat; the courts are brimming over with frivolous lawsuits; courts are a first rather than a last resort; runaway juries make capricious awards to undeserving claimants; immense punitive damage awards are routine; litigation is undermining our ability to compete economically.Each of these is false, but in a complicated way; so let me address this structure of myth, starting with some of the more specific assertions and moving on to the sweeping generalities.I. Too MANY LAwYERs?The first example is the assertion that the United States is home to seventy percent of the world's lawyers.Dropped casually by Vice President Quayle in his August 1991 speech to the American Bar Association (ABA), it was parroted by President Bush, Cabinet members, members of Congress and media experts, and became a familiar factoid in the rhetoric of the 1992 campaign.'This is certainly an alarming figure.It suggests a monstrous deviation from the rest of the world and insinuates that lawyers are a kind of cancerous excrescence on American society.As someone who has studied lawyers comparatively, I wondered how this percentage was determined.Looking at the supporting Council on Competitiveness documents, I
Author: Marc Galanter
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3127638863