Nope. I didn't. And you can't quite decouple the two; there's a continuous lineage; institutions didn't get reinvented with the revolution: * US is a common la

Nope. I didn't. And you can't quite decouple the two; there's a continuous lineage; institutions didn't get reinvented with the revolution: * US is a common law jurisdiction, and indeed, pre-colonization UK courts sometimes act as precedent for post-revolution US courts. * US courts come from colonial courts If you'd like to read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_American_legal_profession https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_American_legal_... "Legal procedures in the 17th century were quite informal, with judges discussing issues directly with the people involved in the case." "Colonial legislatures passed laws to fix the fees lawyers could charge for standardized procedures and maintain these fees relatively low. This often led some lawyers to handle a high volume of cases more speedily." ... and so on. By the time the US formed, you had plenty of lawyers, but you had plenty of people representing themselves (and in cases above what would go into small claims). The concept of statutory legal fees is a good one. It's present in a form in the German legal system. It's limited; you can pay more than statutory fees, but you can't recover more than statutory fees if you lose. That's still powerful. I know of a case where a big party PROBABLY owes a small party a few million dollars, but if they came out liable for opposing side's legal fees, they'd be bankrupt. And the litigation would cost a few years of their life. And yes, cases were simpler, but that's as much a property of the unnecessary rising complexity of our legal system as of the cases. Modern cases shouldn't be so complex.