I mean yeah. A functionally non centralized judicial system with entire chunks of it being held to only regional mores is bound to be a hair on the fucked up side. Can't blame the "US" on this one though. This is New Yawks fault.
I always struggle to describe how the US works to outsiders but the best I've got so far is: Stop thinking of us as a single unified country. Think of us more as a bunch of shitty little countries, many of which are pointless and shouldn't even exist (Heya flyover states with a population of 10) who don't really like eachother, each with their own local mores and laws and taxes, and the laws wildly fluctuate from one country to the next. In New Jersey it's illegal for me to pump my own gas. In Florida I can kill black people if I yell "He's coming right at me!" loud enough. In California I can legally bitch about what is and isn't mexican food and shitty tex-mex. Some of these nations are rich first world nations, frankly some of them aren't. Then over the top of this is oh an empire that has it's own codices of laws, but mainly non overlapping. Federal law mainly concerns itself with what the states can/cannot do and what affects trades between states.
There's a tendency among people from other smaller countries to think of our country along the same terms as theirs, and yes I realize this is super oversimplifying it but: New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Nordic Countries etc are virtually monocultures compared to the United States. And I used the word virtually for a reason, because I know that many of these countries are diverse and have diverse populations within them, but you are much more likely to be able to point to a single shared national culture.
We have 30+ national cultures here each radically different than the others, many of them convinced that they are the "Real America". One could make the argument that we have 50, but I don't really see the point in differentiating the carolinas or the dakotas, and New England as a whole generally are SOMEWHAT similar, and Mississippi is basically a balkan country with rednecks.
Honestly the fact that it works as well as it does is somewhat worrying.
