There's some serious problems with American law. My father is a lawyer, I almost became a lawyer, I've taken a fair number of law classes, spent time with lawyers going over business law, and done some casual legal/historical research. I've read a lot of the famous decisions and critiques of them in my spare time for the hell of it, and I'm reasonably well versed in American law for a non-JD-carrying person.<p>The United States is (mostly) under a system called common law. Long story really short, common law has the advantage of making the law evolve more gradually and less abruptly than the main alternative (civil law) because judges create new law through their decisions and writing opinions.<p>Common law was a pretty good system at one point. Then this happened:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_realism#Essential_beliefs_of_legal_realism" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_realism#Essential_beliefs...</a><p>Legal realism is, in my opinion, one of the largest disasters to hit the United States. Take this, for instance:<p>"Stated differently, legal realists advance two general claims: 1) Law is indeterminate and judges, accordingly, must and do often draw on extralegal considerations to resolve the disputes before them. 2) The best answer to the question "What is (the) law?" is "Whatever judges or other relevant officials do"."<p>Legal realism did two things. The first was that it re-acknowledged that well known and previously fought against notion that judges were influenced by extralegal (outside of the law) considerations. This has been known forever, and has traditionally been battled against - we're all human, but we can aspire to higher and more pure forms of reason and justice, but okay, legal realism acknowledged again that it happened.<p>Second, it specifically blessed that behavior, and encouraged judges to take it.<p>Which has predictably been a disaster.<p>Certain domains of American law, especially family law, are so arbitrarily and capriciously enforced, that there is effectively no law there. Just a set of extremely loose guidelines, and then it's up to the judge's emotions and feelings on the situation. The actual letter of the law routinely gets thrown out, and the spirit of the law is very much an arbitrarily determined thing. I've both participated and sat in on courtrooms where a judge basically outright says, "Yeah, that's the law, but sod that, it's not right so I'm doing something different." (This is possible when the law mandates something that would be "unconscionable", which has become an ever lower threshold to reach)<p>I think common law is too far broken in the States to survive, and personally believe we need to move to a drastically simplified civil law code:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)</a><p>The code should specify very specific remedies for situations, so parties know very predictably what's going to happen when entering into a dispute. That's how legal systems are supposed to work in theory, anyways. This is unlikely to happen without some form of dramatic change, but I think the stability of the United States depends on it. Judges and lawyers answer only to each other, and treat each very well, and the system is rather an unpredictable mess in many areas right now.