US courts are too easy to use as a tool of abuse.
> anyone with a bone to pick could sink you in legal fees and proceedings at a whim
This is FUD, not reality. While it’s “possible” for anyone in any country to try to sue, it simply doesn’t happen in the US more often than elsewhere. The relatively high number of US lawsuits are filled with corporate litigation, contract disputes, bankruptcy filings, car accidents, and appeals, among many other things, and not people suing each other for minor grievances.
“Coffee spills, Pokemon class actions, tobacco settlements. American courts have made a name for themselves as a wild lottery and a money machine for lucky few lawyers. At least in part, however, the reputation is unfounded. American courts seem to handle routine contract and tort disputes as well as their peers in other wealthy democracies.
“More generally, Americans do not file an unusually high number of law suits. They do not employ large numbers of judges or lawyers. They do not pay more than people in comparable countries to enforce contracts. And they do not pay unusually high prices for insurance against routine torts.
“Instead, American courts have made the bad name for themselves by mishandling a few peculiar categories of law suits. In this article, we use securities class actions and mass torts to illustrate the phenomenon, but anyone who reads a newspaper could suggest alternatives.
“The implications for reform are straightforward: focus not on the litigation as a whole; focus on the specifically mishandled types of suits.”
http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/olin_center/papers/pdf/R...
But all that aside, taking that Harvard law article at face value, there are specifically mishandled types of suits, and those include those that are intended to inflict cost on payments processors to get them to reject customers that otherwise aren't doing anything illegal, but just operate in an industry that those suing don't like.
[1] https://instituteforlegalreform.com/wp-content/uploads/media...
The cost of litigation doesn’t prove the US is more litigious, it only demonstrates litigation is expensive in the US. The fact that Germany is the most litigious and that multiple other countries are more litigious than the US is extremely easy for you to verify.
The Institute for Legal Reform is a group that historically denied climate change, and they are funded by and run entirely in the interests of the US’s largest corporations. Personally, I like clean air and water, and US corporations don’t have a great track record of telling the truth about their impacts on the environment. Forgive me if I don’t readily put a lot of stock in their complaints. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Comme...