The easiest way to avoid getting caught doing something wrong is not to be doing anything wrong in the first place.

To answer your questions as best as I can...
1. I don't know about utorrent so I can't help you there.
2. The short answer is that Yes you can be sued. But it is not likely because I don't believe that the MPAA of RIAA can sue you without the permission of the Japenese Licesce holders of the US companies that hold the distribution rights. And both these groups up until this time have turned a blind eye to fansubbing. Although that may be changing soon.

My advice, download only series that have not been licensed in the US and when the serie does get liscensed, buy the DVD's. That is how I do it. It is still illegal, but it gives you a clearer consince.

I'll be completely honest with you, I torrent a lot, A LOT. I'll explain quickly how the torrenting works and then the steps I take to keep myself off radar as much as possible without hurting my download speeds.

Basically what happens in the beginning of a torrent file is that there is one person who has all the data. Then through the tracker anyone who wants the file connects to this person and then each person gets a part of the file, eventually all parts have been distributed and as far as the initial uploader cares he can freely leave. Next people just start trading parts of the file with each other by forming connections between each other through the tracker. This way no one can track where they are uploading to, but they do track where they are dowloading from (as in who is uploading). We call people who have under 100% leechers and people who are done but still uploading seeders. Obivously, seeders upload a lot faster since they don't spend bandwidth dowloading too. 

Generally the way companies farm for torrenters is just a simple torrent client that's modified so that it can mine connections. They usually go after the largest uploaders and not everyone they get. Therefore I choke my upload to 45kb/s. I use a more obscure tracker that is still fast and I try to stay away from things like the pirate bay and mininova, the larger trackers. I stay in a tracker that's a lot more famous in my contry of origin but not known too much outside of it, sorry for not sharing it but it won't be obscure if I just go around telling it to everyone. I also use peerguardian 2, even though the vista version is in beta and doesn't always boot up for some reason. I know it works fine for just about any other system, I think. What the program does to keep you safer is quite literally blocking you from connecting with any known IPs that belong to peers that can sue you, MPAA, RIAA, Chinese Government based in Beijing, whatever. The problem is that there are always new IPs and computers that monitor torrenting so the protectoin is not always complete.

The following methods are ways that I have not tested personally, but I hear they work great too. Get a proxy server, look up Tor and use it, I liek it if I need it. There is a website that launcher recently that anonmizes you and what not. The problem is that it takes monthly charges, it received very good reviews when it launched a few weeks back and it seems quite ligit so far, it's www.torrentfreedom.com.

For further information on torrenting check out www.torrentfreak.com. It's a really nice blog for torrenters that keeps people up to date with the torrenting scene. A few weeks or months ago they had a really nice inteview with one of the companies that tracked torrenter IPs and how it's done if you want to check it out in further detail.

I don't pirate, I only borrow. If i like a product I go out and buy it, if not then I play through it and that's that. I started torrenting because I was fed up with playing shitty hyped up games and wasting my money on them. Same goes for movies. Also, torrenting is not stealing, it's copying. Check out the 2 part film "Steal This Film," it's pretty good.