Between India and US which is more litigious?

I had the privilege of being called for jury duty recently after nearly 40 years of US residency. I pose the question in the subject to be provocative as well as informative. Before I can answer it, some background information. The civil rights movement in US officially ended in 1968, but continues to this day in the courts. Appropriately, the US Presidents since 1968 including Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton, Geroge W Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden hold law degrees to feed the fuel.

To understand the level of depravity, you only need to search for "legalese for abuse". Americans abuse the legal system itself for either pecuniary reasons or to bankrupt an opponent who can be an ex-spouse, employer, etc. The private lawyers litigate endlessly with appeals or delays for trivial reasons while the public prosecutors paid for by the tax-payers surrender. For example, when an ex is served a notice he/she has to attend at the stipulated time and place at their own expense only to realize it is a trap because the abuser had already planned a motion to delay.

Now let me come down to the common applications of the legal apparatus called "abuse". They include often heard domestic abuse, verbal abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, elder abuse and so on. In the case I am familiar with, a middle-aged man was accused of abusing his mother. Assuming they communicated in a mother tongue other than english, without expert translators, and accommodating for translation defects, it is extremely difficult to decide. So the prosecutor, with infinite wisdom but little experience to match, added charges of spousal abuse, which is a crime requiring a jury trial. What I am getting at is: the prosecutor is treading the gray area between verbal abuse, what with freedom of expression as the cornerstone of USA, and physical abuse based on non-medical evidence, hearsay, toying with the jury's emotions, etc.

In a nation that prides itself on gun-culture, brandishing a weapon can be deemed a crime. I haven't seen any high profile cases where mere display of a weapon was considered a crime, even though in a domestic situation it could be construed as abuse, especially when done to gain an upper hand or subjugate the victim. These days the US president, surrounded by the Secret Service, is going after cartels whose members operate in the US without a valid immigration status, but have conjugal relationships within the US. What if a jury decides a cartel member as guilty, thereby facing retribution much after the trial ended? No one knows the answer.

These are the reasons I prefer an AI to weed out the bad cases preempting the jury trials that cost enormously more than single-judge decisions as in India. For example, an AI can ask for physical evidence in a spousal abuse case. The non-emotive AI, by definition, will reject an expensive jury trial without expert testimony. Perhaps a family court judge can make a decision, however flawed it might be.

Assembling a jury in a Work From Home, Zoom-culture, is another deficiency that is easy to fix. After all, it is not a beauty contest, if only bobbing heads in Zoom can be trusted not to broadcast the jury deliberations in youtube or reels. Even then, who has time to go through the live streams of various jury trials all over the US. I can imagine the video servers crashing with "Out Of Memory".

To gain a perspective, in the vintage hollywood movies a jury trial was shown as open to the public. It has morphed these days to fit the capacity of the security at the court houses to scan for the bags and the availability of metal detectors. Guess the wild west movies didn't have that problem. Nor did the famously televised OJ trial in the last century.

I think by now it is amply clear that neither TV nor Internet is welcome in the jury trials and voting booths. That is the price of having a capitalist democracy that thrives on Jekyll-And-Hyde. In India we still see the Robinhood trials. When a common man gets a trinket from a web site, after paying GST on all conceivable things, the courts want to go after the web site owners. Multi National Corporation (MNC's) operating as Rob Peter To Pay Paul are also the fodder for the news as they are sensitive matters affecting jobs, trade and international relations. Finally we have famous movie trials that started with Bollywood blockbuster "Insaf Ka Tarazu". Jai Bhim, Pink, Shahid, OMG, Jolly LLB, etc.

I am reminded of a famous Hollywood line: "You can't handle the truth!" I don't recall if the setting is a military court martial. It already has been a long article and I hear the gavel going down.

Regards