[mmaunder]

Actually this is an established theory. Here's Dr Clifford Winston, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution chatting to Prof. Russ Roberts of George Mason University about the conflict of interest when lawyers make our laws. They also cover the bar system maintaining artificial scarcity among lawyers, thereby inflating legal fees.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.htm...

[anigbrowl]

You could just as easily ask why the bar has been certifying to many law schools when there are so many unemployed lawyers and less than half of JD graduates are able to get jobs practicing law. I'm kind of supportive of Winston's proposals for deregulating the legal services market, but there is definitely not an artificial scarcity.

Of course, you might be wondering why decent legal services still cost upwards of $300/hour, and my answer to that would be that a lawyer who charges $50 an hour has a hard time getting taken seriously. I've seen people come into internet forums asking the most asinine questions before going on to explain that they didn't trust the answers they received from their public defender, because he works for free and therefore he must not be any good.

[te_chris]

Certainly the argument abot the bar system is true. The supreme irony I find is how right wing and anti union some lawyers are.