[legutierr]

The thing is that it is not the barrier to entry of the bar that is creating the expense. It is instead the nature of the law itself. Perhaps the ethical issue here is not the fees that lawyers charge or the licensing process, but the fact that you need them at all in so many situations. The ethical issue is that there are too many laws.

[SwellJoe]

During my (admittedly brief) research into this topic, I began to wonder if perhaps there isn't a self-reinforcing process at work. Lawyers make the laws (because lawyers make up more of the law-making bodies in the US than any other profession by a huge amount), determine who is qualified to both prosecute and defend, determine the restrictions on who can compete with them, and determine how complex the laws will be. The people making the laws thus have a vested interest in them being too complex for the layperson to understand.

I'm genuinely not anti-lawyer. But, I can't help but think the system we have has many unintended consequences, and contributes to a legal system in which only the very wealthy can participate in a meaningful way. This may explain why, for example, polluters always seem to end up in the neighborhoods of poor people. If they set up shop next to a billionaire, they'd be sued out of existence; poor folks simply don't have the funds to fight a big legal battle like that. I'm pretty sure the bar is not the biggest cause of any of this, but it does seem obvious to me that disallowing anyone other than members of the bar from participating directly in the legal process definitely manipulates the market.