The United States has allowed the attorney lobbies and others to unduly influence the laws of the land. The Federal Government should perform a sweeping (“Trump-style”) overhaul of our legal system.
We should make it more difficult to use the legal system to punish people for trivial reasons. For example, there are people to inappropriately use the TRO system as a way to punish those who they feel may have offended them. Trivial small-claims court lawsuits should never be stopped before they get any momentum.
Lawsuit settlements should be capped. Appeals should be limited. We need to do more to streamline the legal process, reduce timeframes for adjudication, reduce costs and less the overall number of cases that are in the system.
We can achieve a lot by simply borrowing from other countries that don’t have the level of disfunctionality that the United States has. We are famous throughout the world for having a lawsuit-obsessed culture.
Such reforms would have a very positive effect on numerous other problems areas such as healthcare where physician decision-making is heavily influenced by the goal of reducing liability exposure and avoiding lawsuits. Examples of this include over-testing, and unwillingness to break away from cookie-cutter therapeutic decision-making even when the doctor may believe a different approach would be in the patient’s best interest. This is why it’s not uncommon to see doctors personally fall ill with disease within their own specialty yet they pursue a therapeutic strategy that is different from the one they have been prescribing to their patients throughout their careers.