The same logic applies to the AMA and its restrictions on the number of medical schools and doctors in the US.

Q: What do they call the person graduating last in his/her medical school class?

A: Doctor.

Yes, but could we ever get the public excited by a call for more lawyers?

The AMA has no say in the number of medical schools. It is a lobbying group for doctors, and it advocates that doctors continue to be highly paid and have free rein to practice how they wish, two positions that contribute to our high medical costs. But they don't control how many doctors are produced.

Medicare, through it's financial support of medical schools, is probably more of a factor.

New medical schools are being built; one is proposed in my community. However, from what I have seen, doctors (unlike construction workers, Dean), can drive up medical costs by increasing utilization. Ten doctors cranking out tests, procedures and prescriptions will cost twice as much as five. The demand is elastic and, so far, the available money keeps apace.

Yes! Dean is absolutely right. Time for the government to stop regulating lawyers.

First, abolish the bar exam.
Obviously the economics profession has done spectacularly well without a qualifying exam. Most economists have never picked up a copy of Keynes' The General Theory let alone read any of it.

Second, abolish all requirements for integrity in the legal profession.
Financial analysts have proved that integrity requirements just limit the market choices.

Third, allow free trade in lawyers. Americans are demanding access to Chinese lawyers who can make legal documents even more incomprehensible.

Also see
http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/Pub...r_run_the
_numbers&slreturn=1

Economics professor Mark J. Perry of U of M, in the article, "The Medical Cartel: Why are MD Salaries So High?" here:

http://wallstreetpit.com/5769-...es-so-high

writes,

The Council on Medical Education and Hospitals of the AMA approves both medical schools and hospitals. By restricting the number of approved medical schools and the number of applicants to those schools, the AMA limits the supply of physicians."

Paul wrote,

First, abolish the bar exam.

Actually, just having the bar exam would drastically lower barriers to entry. IIRC lawyers have to have a law degree.

Obviously the economics profession has done spectacularly well without a qualifying exam. Most economists have never picked up a copy of Keynes' The General Theory let alone read any of it.

If economists created an exam, they wouldn't put Keynes on it; they'd put some crapola about general equilibrium models.

Second, abolish all requirements for integrity in the legal profession.

Dean's not talking about lowering regulation; rather, he's talking about lowering barriers to entry. Not the same thing.

Third, allow free trade in lawyers. Americans are demanding access to Chinese lawyers who can make legal documents even more incomprehensible.

I'm sure there are tens of thousands of Indian lawyers who are very good at English.

That all said, my impression is that the median law school graduate doesn't make all that much money these days. Just because there's economic rent doesn't mean everyone nominally qualified to a piece of it gets rich. Look at the elderly who own a home on a small plot of land, for example.

If this were true, then why does the ABA's Web site say that it accredited nearly 20 law schools since 2000? That excludes Cooley's three branch campuses in Michigan.

The BLS' Occupational Outlook Handbook's entry on lawyers also says there's "keen competition due to the large number of people graduating from law school."

If the ABA is a labor cartel, it's not a very good one.

I note that some of the trolls say that Dean wants to regulate the number of lawyers. For those who actually read what he says, he wants to deregulate and allow a free market for law schools and foreign born and educated lawyers to come to this country. Still, I wonder in a market already glutted by attorneys if there is some other factors that apparently keep attorney fees and salaries artificially high.

See this entry from "Lawyers, Guns, and Money"

"...Recently I’ve been emphasizing that, according to long-term projections, American law schools are going to be turning out two graduates for every available legal job. It’s worth noting that the present situation is actually worse than that. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the “legal sector” (this means everybody employed in a legally-related job, not just attorneys, i.e., paralegals, other admin staff, etc.) added 100 jobs in November. That’s in America. 100 jobs. Total.

This, by the way, counts as comparatively good news, since the legal sector is down 3,100 jobs since last November.

Assuming that within that sector lawyers aren’t being hired at a faster rate than other personnel, this means that, over the past year, ABA law schools haven’t cranked out two new lawyers for every available job, but rather that the ratio has been even worse than that.

There are no new jobs. This means that every new lawyer who gets a job is, as a matter of current economic reality, taking a job from a non-new lawyer who had one. (In some cases this will involve retirement, death, or a truly voluntary exit from the profession, but in many cases it won’t). People focus on the entry-level job market for attorneys, and of course that’s crucial, but they tend to forget that the problems of our industry go way beyond the fact that half of our newest crop of graduates aren’t getting real legal jobs of any sort. What about our graduates from two and four and six years ago, a large percentage of whom are losing their jobs, and are currently every bit as legally unemployed as our graduates who never got a legal job in the first place? Do we know what the percentage is for the graduates of our particular law school? We do not, because we have not made the relevant inquiries.

Again, there are no new jobs. On net, this is not hyperbole: it is a simple statistical truth. The “optimistic” take from the BLS is that things will soon get “better,” and we can get back to producing two new attorneys for every new legal job. But right now the American economy is losing legal jobs — and the ratio of new lawyers to available legal positions may well be quite a bit worse than two to one."

Re what rickstersherpa, one problem is that of incentives.

From a selfish, incentive-centric perspective, law schools benefit from greater matriculation, except to the extent that grads not getting jobs hurts their reputation.

I was in an arts and science department in the mid-1990s at a not-highly-rated research university. My department didn't grant lots of PhDs, but most of the ones they did really didn't deserve a PhD.

But in terms of incentives, it made the department look good to the university, made the prof look good, and superficially made the student look good. Everyone wins! Not.

The whole thing smacks of the tragedy of the commons.

Dean does seem to hate protectionism for lawyers. I would point out that the average law school grad carries more than 100k in student loans upon graduation. That average law school grad has also been led to believe that the effort involved, the debt accrued and the time invested is worthwhile. The average law school grad is mistaken. I know because I am an average law school grad.

The legal market fell apart in 2008 and prior to 2008 it was barely functional.(However, misleading school statistics rates suggest employment rates of 95% after graduation. Those school's neglect to mention that those employment rates include waitressing and bartending, etc.). There is certainly protectionism for lawyers. There are certainly attorneys getting paid outrageous sums of money, although, many of those people work ungodly hours for that pay. But for 75% of law graduates, law school is a colossal economic and "life" mistake. One that is looked on by the court system less favorably then running a failed strip club, due to the impossibility of getting rid of student debt in bankruptcy.

As someone else already commented, if the ABA is a labor cartel, it's not a very good one.

From my outsiders point of view (Im from Finland) problem in America is that education costs so much.

Prospective students want real returns for their investment so they expect to get multiple times initial amount invested in lifetime returns. The problem in compounded because university education costs so much.

In here for instance where education is free a layer may earn for example 3500-4000 euros per month, compared to office workers 2500. Rather small wage difference is enough to get people choose this career path.

There's something else wrong with the legal profession other than supply. There are a lot unemployed or unemployed lawyers in the profession but many people still cannot afford legal representation.

Lawyers for ordinary people need to be able to do high volume, low cost work but most do not have the resources to meet this demand. And it is difficult to do that in litigation without violating professional ethics.

The defense attorneys represent corporations that can afford to influence policy, discourage legitimate claims with expensive litigation, heighten discovery requirements, or compel people to sign unfavorable settlements agreements due to limited financial resources of plaintiffs. Although, corporations have been commanding cheaper representation and this is hurting some defense attorneys.

Also adding more lawyers will only make more people lawyers that do not practice law. The profession has signaling requirements that dramatically limit the number of qualified lawyers for legal positions. Those employers are able to do that because their clients do not care about price when it comes to certain legal issues.

I believe that legal representation is high for ordinary people because the work is infrequent which requires a higher price but the clients demand a high-scale, low cost solution to their problems. Also, the price takes into account the risk of not making a dime if you lose or losing out on other opportunities for an extended period of time. There's the cost of litigation or running an office with at least one employee in most instances. The price insensitive defendants allow defense attorney's to hire only the small pool of inexperienced attorneys with highly impressive signals.

I am not an economist but there's more than meets the eye on these salaries. Although, I suspect that allowing more competition would perhaps lower the cost for corporate clients but would leave the small dilemma for the ordinary person. Although, the influence of those white shoe firms would vigorously defend their protectionism monopoly on major corporate accounts against international competition or perhaps they would just merge with them without any antitrust review.

My wife just paid $400/hr for an attorney on a supposedly "open and shut" discrimination claim, and it would have been $475 if they had not given her a quote just before raising their rates. That's kinda the headline number that potential lawyers might look at before deciding on getting into law school.

However, that's would they have to charge to pay off those law school bills on anything resembling a timely basis...while per the LGM article, over half are pulling down more like less than median wages. So the question is, would destroying the ABA monopoly on accreditation open up the field to cheaper law schools, and thereby maybe cheaper lawyers, or would it just allow more schools to get into overcharging for entry into an oversatured field and drive high priced attorney wannabes into inextricable debt poverty? Mr. Baker, your thoughts?

Re: Jeffrey Smith
Sorry I don't track responses daily, so this is late. Medical schools producing M.D.s are acredited by Liason Committe on Medical Education which is sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the AMA. The AMA does have half the input into the accrditation process. There are also medical schools graduating D.O. (Doctor of Osteopathy) physicians, who are generally granted equal status with M.D.s (I have always worked with D.O.s and M.D.s) and the AMA have no say in accrediting those schools which are, in fact, expanding.