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Deregulating the legal profession will benefit society by improving access to legal services and the efficacy of public policies.
Deregulating the legal profession, the authors argue, would allow more people to provide a variety of legal services without jeopardizing their quality, reduce the cost of those services, spur competition and innovation in the private sector, and increase the quality of lawyers who pursue careers in the public sector. Legal practitioners would enjoy more fulfilling careers, and society in general and its most vulnerable members in particular would benefit greatly.
List of contents
Contents:
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction
2. Returns to Law School Before and After the Great Recession
3. A Brief Assessment of the Market for a Legal Education
4. Law Firms
5. Self-Selection of Government Lawyers and the Earnings Penalty
6. Resource Constraints for Lawyers in Government
7. Justice Ideology and Supreme Court Decisions
8. A Synthesis
9. Policy Reforms to Improve the Legal Profession and Benefit the Nation
References
Notes
Index
About the author
Clifford Winston, the Searle Freedom Trust Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution's Economic Studies program, has been with Brookings since 1984. He is an applied microeconomist who specializes in the analysis of industrial organization, regulation, and transportation.Winston has also been co-editor of the annual microeconomics edition of
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Prior to his fellowship at Brookings, he was an Associate Professor in the Transportation Systems Division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Civil Engineering. He has published numerous books and articles, including, most recently,
Autonomous Vehicles: The Road to Economic Growth?, with Quentin Karpilow (Brookings 2020) and
First Thing We Do, Let's Deregulate All the Lawyers, with Robert Crandall and Vikram Maheshri (Brookings, 2011).
David Burk is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University.
Jia Yan is Professor of Economics at Washington State University.
Summary
Uses an economic approach to provide empirical support for legal reformers who are concerned about their own profession. The authors highlight the adverse effects of the legal profession's self-regulation, which raises the cost of legal education, decreases the supply of lawyers, and limits the public's access to justice.
