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by cookiecaper
3725 days ago
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There is no need for onerous restrictions they place on admittance. It used to be that you became a lawyer by apprenticing in a lawyer's office and reading the text of the law. That's how lawyers came up for generations until the post-secondary boom in the 1950s. Now, that time-tested method is illegal in all but a small handful of states due to ABA guidelines. Of course, the superficial justification is that if you don't go to school for 8 years and pay $150k+ into the education industry before you can get a crack at real work, then it's because you're a fraud who wants to fleece the general populous. There is obviously going to be a surface justification. However, many lawyers are still primarily interested in fleecing people, and the artifical barriers to entrance probably only serve to further incentivize it; that's a big chunk of debt hanging over one guy's head. Suppose he wanted to undercut his competition and offer meaningful legal services that a normal person could actually afford; oops, he needs to bill $200/hr because after overhead, 65% of that goes to his student loan payments. :| However, I'm sure that the ABA and AMA do not function at all like unions and are run by truly beautiful people with stunningly pure hearts who would never put their own self-interest above the general welfare. I am sure the strength of their character fully precludes any attempt to keep competition low and/or to make the minimum viable price point of the profession artificially high. Such a thing would serve only to enrich them and their compatriots while blanket disqualifying large chunks of people that would otherwise make great lawyers and/or doctors, and of course, the people in charge would never even fathom something like that. |
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