More coverage for the Frank Buckley-edited new book on overlegalization, The American Disease [Richard Reinsch/Library of Law and Liberty, Alejandro Chafuen/Forbes] Here’s Buckley in the National Post:
If litigation rates are four times smaller in Canada than the United States, this should not occasion surprise: Subsidize something and you get more of it; penalize it and you get less of it.
Differences in legal ethics matter, too. In America, more than elsewhere, lawyers are encouraged to advance their client’s interests without regard to the interests of justice in the particular case or broader social concerns. American lawyers’ professional culture is unique in permitting and implicitly encouraging them to assert novel theories of recovery, coach witnesses, and wear down their opponents through burdensome pretrial discovery.
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On the other hand, see next post where speech gets you fined
Oxymoron, n., contradiction in terms, e.g., legal ethics
then again, the next story comes out of quebec where your business name has to sound french enough to please the authorities. Sometimes i wish they’d just secede.
It would build credibility to the legal system if plaintiffs and their lawyers had something to lose. Currently our civil litigation system is a “nothing to lose – to – everything to win” for plaintiffs. Even defendants who “win” their cases lose by having to pay to defend them.