[rcar]

Fine, but you could just as easily flip the arrow or come up with a common cause to come up with a plausible narrative. In areas with low economic growth, lawyers are a high status, high earning potential field, and so why not go into that field? Maybe areas with autocratic leadership see both more complex laws and lower economic growth, leading to a necessity for more lawyers overall.

Observational studies like this are not sufficient to answer these sorts of questions even if you can use them to come up with cute, cheeky headlines.

[dexterdog]

But what do lawyers actually create that would be part of any economic growth. It seems to me that they are just toll takers for access to justice and bureaucracy.