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Comment by skew-aberration | Hacker News Reader

Such systems do exist in 'civil law' (vs common law) countries (which are most of them outside the English-speaking world).

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Yes, although they don't really obviate the issues raised by GP (costs, length, complexity).

If anything, some of the largest civil law countries in Europe, like Germany and Italy, can arguably be considered worse than common law countries in all of these respects. Whether that's incidental or due to civil law, I cannot say.

Check out the amount of lawyers per capita. From experience in Berlin, one of the most dysfunctional German states, the length of lawsuits is a big problem, complexity I don't know - but costs are not crazy, and loser pays (a fixed amount depending on properties of the case). AFAIU, a side can pay more than the fixed amount for their lawyer, but the loser will not pay more. All that discourages outspending someone with frivolous litigation.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/lawyers-p...

> Check out the amount of lawyers per capita

Apparently a highly biased measurement because the German legal system has more public funding compared to the US. I asked «For an argument against litigious societies, where someone points to "lawyers per capita" to compare the US with Germany, what might be a better yardstick?»

The response was interesting to me: the key bit was "Germany has a massive civil service and specialized court system where many law degree holders work as judges or state administrators". I'm a geek from New Zealand so unfortunately that isn't something I can validate from knowledge.

This is a very simplistic approach in itself that is self contradictory. You can't just lump together all legal proceedings of "largest civil law countries" together and compare that to common law countries in general. Statistics will be very different based on exact type of proceedings, the type of cases you try to compare ... if you can find any reliable statistics at all that compares apples to apples as they say. Take a look at the best the EU has (covering both civil law and common law countries) at https://www.coe.int/en/web/cepej for 2022 data. Italy is indeed an outlier in almost all legal areas, but it's just not in any ways similar to Germany... And I also couldn't point to any clear cliffs between common law and continental law countries. The US works very differently with its own 50 states. They have their own statistics at https://www.ncsctableauserver.org/t/Research/views/TrialDash.... But it's very difficult to do any meaningful comparison with the CEPEJ (Council of Europe) data above. It's very judgmental even to compare seemingly simple things, such as what does actually a "criminal law case" means in one jurisdiction and if that is roughly the same in another. The NCS and CEPEJ are probably well equipped to make decisions on convering the data to be comparable after long deliberations by expert court statisticians doing this all their life... but I wouldn't dare to do that by myself, even if assisted by "Fable 99" and billions of tokens.

I'm not sure I understand what you are referring to here. The lack of a jury system, or no trial procedures? Both common law and 'civil law' has quite similar forensic expert and arbitration systems. One thing I can think of as a difference is that in civil law notary systems (and civil cases), you may request an out-of-court preliminary evidence taking. But you can have something similar in pre-trial discovery/disclosure in common law, at least in the UK (where you don't have jury system at all in civil cases).

I suggest you google the phrase 'civil law country' or 'English common law' as I can't do the topic justice here.

The English legal system/philosophy (including jury trial and the adversarial prosecution/defense dichotomy) derives historically from English/Anglo-Saxon traditions (the 'common' law of England) and differs substantially in some respects from the legal systems in other countries which derive from Roman and later French/Napoleonic conventions (known confusingly as 'civil' law).

EDIT: although you mention civil law in your other comment - what I am getting at is the difference in role of judge/prosecutor in criminal cases between the two systems being comparable to GGP's suggestion

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