Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News

The legal profession has long sought to turn itself into a cartel. Among its anti-competitive tactics is mandating that prospective lawyers go through a needlessly long and expensive period of education. The truth is that very little that a lawyer needs to know is learned in law school classrooms and that which is essential, particularly legal research and writing, could easily be learned elsewhere.

In the early 1900s, we had a free market in legal education. People could go to a law school, and the institutions varied considerably. Few schools tried to keep students enrolled for three years, since most students thought the benefits of additional years weren’t worth the costs. But the majority of lawyers did not go to law school at all. Instead, they learned their profession while working in law firms. Many became extraordinary lawyers and jurists.

It’s still true that lawyers learn almost everything on the job. Today, however, they must first go through three years of law school, taking a lot of courses they’ll immediately forget. That high, artificial barrier to entry exists only because the American Bar Association lobbied for state legislation making its model of legal education the only path into the profession.

Two consequences of this regulation are that we have more law schools and professors than we otherwise would, and that many poorer people can’t afford legal assistance because lawyers must generate high fees to cover the cost of their degrees.

States should deregulate legal education by allowing anyone to attempt the bar exam. It should no more matter how an individual learned the material for the bar than it matters to an orchestra how a prospective musician learned to play. Law schools now enjoy a captive market, and if they had to compete against other modes of legal education, costs would fall and efficiency would rise.