But now a growing number of political scientists are arguing that America's famous litigiousness isn't rooted in plain and simple greed but is rather the logical response to America's distinctive distribution of power and to a historical distrust of big government.

The proliferation of lawsuits grows out of "fundamental features of the American constitutional tradition," Thomas F. Burke, assistant professor of political science at Wellesley College, declares in a new book, "Lawyers, Lawsuits and Legal Rights: The Battle over Litigation in American Society."

In other words, blame the founding fathers for their deep mistrust of centralized authority and their glorified view of self-reliance. The government they structured - with its separation of powers, its limited national control over state and local police forces and its independent judiciary - was intended to protect against tyranny, but it also had the unintended consequence of making it harder for democratically elected leaders to get things done.

While countries like Britain, Germany, France or Sweden have a centralized government with powerful regulatory agencies to provide safeguards and with generous social welfare benefits to cushion life's blows, Professor Burke argues, the decentralized American system forces Americans to take their problems to court. So instead of national health care, he says, Americans get proposals for a "patients' bill of rights" that would allow the sick to sue their managed-care companies.

Professor Burke was a student of Robert A. Kagan, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "Adversarial Legalism: The American Way of Law." Professor Kagan argues that while the public is suspicious of government, it nonetheless "expects and demands comprehensive governmental protections from serious harm, injustice and environmental dangers."

This "fundamental tension" forces people to turn to the courts to do everything from cleaning up the environment to rooting out discrimination, or to go one step further, to warn them away from unhealthy overeating or even unexpectedly scalding coffee. Under this system of "adversarial legalism," as Professor Kagan calls it, the judiciary and lawyers become a critical part of the governing process.

Both Professors Kagan and Burke rely in part on the work of the Stanford legal historian Lawrence Friedman, who in his 1985 book, "Total Justice," wrote that growing wealth and technological advances were leading people to expect government to solve their problems. As Professor Kagan said recently, "People used to say if we can put a man on the moon, we certainly ought to be able to figure out how to make a product safe." This quest for "total justice" has had the effect of creating a far greater role for courts and lawyers: because elected officials aren't sufficiently empowered to bring changes, people turn to the judiciary.

Modern tort law actually developed because the American government wasn't passing laws to protect people from the hazards of the industrial revolution, Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, explains in his book "Why Lawsuits Are Good for America," published last year. The courts stepped in to mandate safety measures, some of them life saving, when the legislatures refused to.

By the middle of the 20th century, lawyers discovered that litigation could also be a tool for broad social change, filing the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. Then Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, inviting plaintiffs to sue to open up the workplace to women and minorities.

This was the era of what's known as the "due process revolution," when lawyers won criminal defendants the right to counsel and welfare recipients the right to hearings. Eventually, the aged and disabled won rights that were likewise enforceable by lawsuits. Lawyers began bringing class actions, and the law seemed to be expanding into every facet of daily life. Sexual harassment law developed in the 1980's, for example, bringing the courts into the workplace.

All of this alarmed corporations and insurance companies, which began lobbying to limit their liability. By the 1990's, popular books like "The Litigation Explosion" by Walter Olson and "The Death of Common Sense" by Philip K. Howard made the threat of litigation a public cause, warning that individual greed was replacing community values.

Like many liberal academics, Michael McCann, a political science professor at the University of Washington and the co-author of a forthcoming book, "Law's Lore: Tort Reform, Mass Media and the Social Production of Legal Knowledge," was once optimistic about using the courts to solve social problems. But now he concedes that lawsuits are often not the best way to get things done. The system is costly, inefficient and unpredictable, he and other scholars say, deterring meritorious claims and inspiring contentiousness.

Lawsuits are far too cumbersome to help the vast majority of people, Professor Burke says. Of 100 Americans injured in an accident, he writes, only 10 make a liability claim and only 2 file a lawsuit. Only 1 in 8 people who suffer serious injury from medical malpractice sue, he finds, and only about 50 in 1,000 who believe they've encountered discrimination at work file an action.

Professor Burke also argues that partly because of well-organized defense lawyers, court decisions are skewed against plaintiffs: in his case-study of the Americans With Disabilities Act, for example, Professor Burke finds that about 95 percent of plaintiffs lost on appeal. None of this means the laws have no effect, he maintains - companies may settle those cases that have merit or be deterred from violating the law in the first place - but the system is far from equitable or predictable.

Still, Professor Burke doesn't believe that the solution is simply to limit lawsuits and monetary awards. "That doesn't sort out frivolous from nonfrivolous cases," he said. He argues that replacements - say, no-fault auto insurance - could substitute for much of today's costly postaccident litigation.

Academics across the political spectrum point to state-run workers' compensation schemes as a rare example of a government-run alternative to litigation in America: a way to help injured workers without making them fight it out in court. Although such government-run systems have their drawbacks, even Mr. Olson, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, is surprisingly sanguine about them. In his forthcoming book, "The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens the Rule of Law," Mr. Olson warns that mass litigation has transformed lawyers and judges into an unelected "fourth branch of government." So to him, a workers' comp-style alternative to lawsuits would be an improvement. "It's so much more civilized," he said recently.

Scholars are now watching the heated debate over the Securities and Exchange Commission to see how the American political system will respond to a recent crisis that some say has come right out of the distorted debate over litigation. In the mid-1990's, responding to complaints about lawsuits from accounting firms, Congress changed the law to make it harder for corporate shareholders to sue the accountants.

That, along with some other legal changes, essentially immunized accounting firms from liability for fraud, said John Coffee, a law professor at Columbia University who has written widely about securities class actions. "That can translate into greater acquiescence in aggressive and dubious accounting policies management wants to pursue," Professor Coffee said.

Professor Burke says the accounting fraud scandal is a consequence of the myths about American litigiousness. Congress took away the right to sue, he argues, but failed to substitute another credible means of enforcing the law. "So what are we going to do now?" Professor Burke asked. "Will we build up the S.E.C.?"

That is, of course, the focus of a bitterly contested political battle. But skeptical political scientists doubt that the fragmented federal government will be able to take a strong stand. Which means more calls to bring back the lawsuits are likely. As Professor Kagan said, "We end up with adversarial legalism because we have all of these government failures."