America is low-context. What that means is that we spell out ev-er-y-thing, down to the last letter, phoneme, or nuance. That behavior pattern is never going to go away by an act of will. It is a result of having, not lawyers, but the biggest mix of cultures and languages since Babel. The lawyers are a result of that (insert feedback loop here ;).

So, that doesn't modify your whole argument, just explains why "arbitrary" is such a bad word over here. In most countries I've been in outside the U.S.A., the power representatives (judges, police, statesmen, etc.) have a modicum of *personality* power over the subgroup, and can render judgment on laws and squabbles with the assumption that all parties either 1) share the culture of the arbiter, and in some way submit themselves to that power relationship on a personal level, or 2) are outsiders, in which case the parties don't bother trying to pretend things are really fair. In the U.S., since a far greater number (some would say a majority) of power interactions are cross-cultural to some extent, we pretend harder. This results in achingly exact descriptions of what is right and what is wrong, so that behavior can be dealt with as behavior, and not as intent, intent being much harder to define in a cross-cultural context than in a monoculture.

To rephrase, in most societies, the people in power can rule on disputes. Here, "the people are the power" and dispute over rules (that was pithier than I usually like, but I couldn't pass it up :).