THE ABA CARTEL: Rule of Lawyers.

It’s probably true that in some parts of the country, wealthy lawyers have monopolized the elite social networks that are helpful for launching successful Congressional campaigns. But it’s also not obvious that making more money available to non-lawyers, in and of itself, would solve this problem. The empirical evidence that higher expenditures actually increase a candidate’s chances of winning a Congressional race is still equivocal at best.

Here’s a more straightforward solution—one that would be good policy even if it doesn’t usher hundreds more working people into the Senate and House: Let’s rein in the American Bar Association cartel and introduce more competition into the legal services sector.

Lawyers at big firms are able to command extraordinary rates (24 year-old associates now make $180,000) not because their talents are so extraordinarily rare, but because, as Clifford Winston and Quentin Karpilow have argued in the American Economic Review, the ABA has created a protectionist racket that shuts competitors out of the market and blocks the technological innovation that has brought prices down for services in so many other sectors. For example, even routine paperwork that could easily be performed at lower cost by less-credentialed workers must be carried out by lawyers in many states. And firms not owned by ABA-approved lawyers are prohibited from selling any legal services in the United States, even if they hired lawyers to do the relevant work.

Eliminating some of these gratuitous barriers to entry in the legal services market would likely ameliorate inequality in two ways: First, it would make legal services cheaper and more accessible to people who can’t afford them. Second, by rolling back the ABA’s rent-seeking and making the market more fair, it would rein in the financial and political power held by high-flyers at Big Law. In other words, we can weaken the rule of lawyers while strengthening the rule of law.

If you’d like more detail on what that might look like, you should read not one, but two books by my colleague Ben Barton: Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, and The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System. They address both the problems with excessive lawyer influence, and the promise of new technologies to expand access to the law. And both address the baleful role of the ABA in making things worse.