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The United States has too many lawyers with too much time on their hands, and too great a need to have billable hours to secure their positions in the firms for which they work.

The result of this glut of 'legal' practitioners has been the development of a culture of litigation in this country that has warped the fabric of human relationships.

In a bygone era, when people had problems with others, they either ignored them if they were trivial enough, or confronted them. If your neighbor's fence encroached on your yard, you went over and talked to him to work out a reasonable solution. If your kid brought a lousy report card home, you made him do more homework; no TV or nights out until the grades improved.

We are now living in a 'no-fault' society in which any setback or problem can become the subject of litigation.

A woman buys a cup of hot coffee from a fast food outlet. Sitting in a car driven by her teenage son, she puts the cup between her legs to take care of something else. The kid, driving like teenage boys will often drive, zigged when he should have zagged; the coffee spilled, causing severe burns on the inside of her thighs. Instead of just getting medical treatment and learning from her mistake, she sues the restaurant - and wins. Now, when you buy a cup of coffee, it comes with a warning label: "contents are hot." Well, shut my mouth; I would hope so, unless you really wanted iced coffee.

A State Department employee was sued a few years ago by the fianc of a visa applicant for failing to issue her a visa on the date of his choice. He'd scheduled the wedding before even filing the paperwork for the visa, and wanted the employee to reimburse him for the cost of getting the invitations reprinted. Fortunately, this case was eventually thrown out of court, but not before the generation of several reams of paper explaining that the employee was processing the case in accordance with the law and regulations, and the visa was issued in the normal time it takes for such cases.

Employers, especially those in government, now face the prospect of being sued for giving unsatisfactory performance evaluations - even to substandard workers. If the poor performance is documented, the cases are usually thrown out, but only after hundreds of pages of discovery and depositions, and days of interviews. The productive time lost to such activity is tremendous.

Many theories and justifications have been advanced for this state of affairs. Defenders of such litigation argue that it is necessary in order to protect the rights of the individual. While no one can argue against this point, it seems painfully obvious that the situation has spun out of control.

The real reason for so much litigation these days is the increasing abdication of personal responsibility that has infected our society. Parents don't accept responsibility for the poor academic performance of their children. On the one hand, they complain about too much homework; then they turn around and sue the school when Johnny doesn't learn how to read.

The time has come for each of us to take back responsibility for our own lives. Let the lawyers find something else to do with their time.

Learn more about this author, Charles Ray.
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