Study Finds Bar Exam Requirements Greatly Reduce the Number of Lawyers

New research by legal scholar Kyle Roxzema finds that bar exam requirements reduce the number of lawyers by 16%, and even variations in the difficulty of exam requirements have big effects.

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An important new study by Washington University (St. Louis) legal scholar Kyle Rozema finds that bar exam requirements massively reduce the number of lawyers. While some might cheer that result, the main effect is to increase the cost and reduce the availability of legal services. Lack of access to affordable legal representation is a serious problem in our legal system, particularly for the poor and lower middle class.

The ABA Journal has a helpful summary of several of Rozema's key findings:

If jurisdictions eliminate the bar exam as an entry to attorney licensure, the labor supply of lawyers would increase by 16%, according to new research by Kyle Rozema, an associate professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis…..

Additionally, Rozema found that the labor supply of lawyers would increase by 8% if states adopt the most lenient bar exam policies and would decrease by 14% if the strictest policies are adopted….

Rozema also examined the time period between taking a bar exam, getting the results and being admitted to practice law. The average lawyer can get a law license five months after graduation, according to the working paper, which is posted on SSRN.

"Although this lag may seem like a temporary delay to recent law school graduates, the fact that it happens each year to subsequent cohorts means that changes to policies that eliminate the lag can increase labor supply by as much as 3%," Rozema wrote.

The 16% figure is an imperfect estimate, and Rozema notes a number of factors it doesn't consider. But even if the true reduction in the number of lawyers caused by bar exam requirements is "only," say, 10%, it's still a big effect.

Many people dislike lawyers and believe there are too many of them. If you hold that view, you might conclude that Rozema's findings are cause for celebration! Things could be even better if state governments made bar exams more onerous, thereby reducing the number of lawyers even more.

But restricting the number of lawyers makes their services more expensive, reducing competition in the legal profession. This makes it difficult or impossible for many lower-income people get access to legal services - a problem that has been long been highlighted by economists, legal scholars, and activists. It's a rare point of agreement between conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and liberal Sonia Sotomayor. (though I am not a fan of her proposed solution to the problem).

The reduction in competition might be worth it if bar exams tested skills that practitioners must have in order to be effective lawyers. In reality, however, bar exams are largely a test of your ability to memorize thousands of arcane rules, the vast majority of which most practitioners don't actually use. As co-blogger Orin Kerr puts it, "when [the bar exam] is over you can forget everything you just learned." The reason you can do that is you are unlikely to ever use that knowledge again!

Essentially, bar exams screen out large numbers of people whose memorization skills aren't good enough to remember a vast number of rules. Yet many people with relatively weak memorization skills can still be competent lawyers - especially in an age where it is relatively easy to look up details in electronic databases.

The main beneficiaries of bar exams are not consumers of legal services, but already licensed lawyers. The exams reduce the amount of competition we face!

For this reason, I have long been an advocate of  abolishing bar exams, even though it may not be in my self-interest to hold that view. More recently, such luminaries as Yale Law School Prof. Stephen Carter have joined the "ban the bar exam" bandwagon (I commented on his critique here). As I have pointed out in previous writings on this topic, abolishing the bar exam wouldn't deprive consumers of all indicators of a lawyer's competence (or lack thereof). The public could still rely on voluntary certification mechanisms, the lawyer's track record, referrals from previous clients, and other factors.

And state bar associations could still offer bar exams if they wanted to. If passage really is an indicator of quality useful to consumers, lawyers would have an incentive to take the exams and advertise the fact they passed them. Making the exam optional would incentivize bar associations to revamp them in ways that make them better measures of competence.

For the record, I also advocate abolishing the requirement (in force in most states) that lawyers must graduate from an ABA-accredited law school; though Rozema finds that that requirement actually has much less impact in reducing the number of lawyers than the bar exam does (I am not sure his conclusion there is correct). Let law schools compete in the voluntary certification market!

But if abolition is too radical an approach for you to swallow, I take this opportunity to once again tee up my "modest proposal" for bar exam reform:

Members of bar exam boards… and presidents and other high officials of state bar associations should be required to take and pass the bar exam every year by getting the same passing score that they require of ordinary test takers. Any who fail to pass should be immediately dismissed from their positions…. And they should be barred from ever holding those positions again until… they take and pass the exam.

After all, if the bar exam covers material that any practicing lawyer should know, then surely the lawyers who lead the state bar and administer the bar exam system itself should be required to know it. If they don't, how can they possibly be qualified for the offices they hold? Surely it's no excuse to say that they knew it back when they themselves took the test, but have since forgotten….

Of course, few if any bar exam officials or state bar leaders could pass the bar exam without extensive additional study…. That's because, as anyone who has taken a bar exam knows, they test knowledge of thousands of arcane legal rules that only a tiny minority of practicing lawyers ever use. This material isn't on the exam because you can't be a competent lawyer if you don't know it. It's there so as to make it more difficult to pass, thereby diminishing competition for current bar association members….

If bar exam board members and bar association leaders were required to take and pass the exam every year, they would have strong incentives to reduce the amount of petty trivia that is tested. After all, anything they include on the exam is something they themselves will have to memorize! As prominent practicing lawyers, however, they presumably are already familiar with those laws that are so basic that any attorney has to know them; by limiting the exam to those rules, they can minimize their own preparation time. In this way, the material tested on bar exams might be limited to the relatively narrow range of legal rules that the average practicing lawyer really does need to know.

Rozema's study strengthens the case for the "modest proposal" and for other, more conventional, approaches to reducing the amount of material tested on bar exams.

Comments

[Vandalia]

There are two flaws with this argument:

The first is that lawyers compete on price. Whenever I have engaged an attorney, the price is never mentioned. In fact, when it came to my mother's guardianship after a traumatic brain injury, and later when dealing with her estate, compensation was never discussed. There was simply a bill in the end. No engagement letter of anything. That is the way it works in "underserved" rural communities.

The second is that the value of a certifying exam is in the material tested. The importance of passing a "bar exam", or a medical board certification exam, is that it demonstrates that the individual has the discipline to study and has the ability to determine and acquire the necessary information; even if it is forgotten the next day.

Finally, if there is no bar exam, it should be made easy for a victim of legal malpractice to sue the faculty of the law school the attorney graduated from. If there is no bar exam, the fact that an individual received a degree should require the unanimous agreement of the faculty that the graduate is fully qualified - both in knowledge and personal morality - to practice as an attorney in any environment. And law school faculty members should be held accountable if it turns out that this is not the case.

Or if we were to modify Professor Somin's approach, law school faculty members should be required to demonstrate that they can pass every course offered that year by the law school.

[myself]

The first is that lawyers compete on price. Whenever I have engaged an attorney, the price is never mentioned. In fact, when it came to my mother’s guardianship after a traumatic brain injury, and later when dealing with her estate, compensation was never discussed. There was simply a bill in the end. No engagement letter of anything. That is the way it works in “underserved” rural communities.

That's at least partially because there's a pseudo-monopoly in rural communities due to the lack of lawyers.

I know my firm has changed legal representation because our original lawyer was too expensive (and slow).

The second is that the value of a certifying exam is in the material tested. The importance of passing a “bar exam”, or a medical board certification exam, is that it demonstrates that the individual has the discipline to study and has the ability to determine and acquire the necessary information; even if it is forgotten the next day.

Sure, but that's of dubious value, particularly since memorization skills vary among people.

Finally, if there is no bar exam, it should be made easy for a victim of legal malpractice to sue the faculty of the law school the attorney graduated from.

I've heard of students suing schools for giving them a poor education, but never employers suing schools because they didn't educated the student well enough.

If schools would be held liable for legal malpractice without bar exams, then does it not follow that Bar Associations would be held liable for legal malpractice in the current system?

After all, if your lawyer commits malpractice who could be more to blame than the bar association that both tested (and passed) them and didn't subsequently disbar them?

the fact that an individual received a degree should require the unanimous agreement of the faculty that the graduate is fully qualified – both in knowledge and personal morality – to practice as an attorney in any environment. And law school faculty members should be held accountable if it turns out that this is not the case.

That's not the case in any other field, I don't see why it should be in law.

Or if we were to modify Professor Somin’s approach, law school faculty members should be required to demonstrate that they can pass every course offered that year by the law school.

A conclusion built on a stack of dubious claims.

It's true that lawyers who pass the bar are, in general, stronger than those who don't. But that's not exclusively true.

The better model for law might be something similar to what engineers do.

They start with a relatively easy "anyone competent should pass" exam to become an Engineer in Training, which qualifies them to do many things, but not everything a full Engineer can.

After a few years of professional experience they can go for the next (tougher) exam to become a Professional Engineer.

[myself]

Or if we were to modify Professor Somin’s approach, law school faculty members should be required to demonstrate that they can pass every course offered that year by the law school.

Rereading the end of the post I believe you're referring to the "modest proposal".

But the suggestion was not a serious one, hence the description of it as a "modest proposal".

[Lee Moore]

The second is that the value of a certifying exam is *** in the material tested. The importance of passing a “bar exam”, or a medical board certification exam, is that it demonstrates that the individual has the discipline to study and has the ability to determine and acquire the necessary information; even if it is forgotten the next day.

Is there a “not” missing where I’ve put the ***s ?

I would tend to agree. The material absorbed and regurgitated for the exam may be of limited use in actual legal practice, but at least the exams sift out those who cannot deal with an obstacle course from those who can.

[M L]

I think the commenter meant in the first line, that the "two flaws with this argument" are false premises. “That the value of a certifying exam is in the material tested” is a false premise. Same with “The first is that lawyers compete on price,” he’s suggesting they don’t.

[Area Man]

"Study Finds Bar Exam Requirements Greatly Reduce the Number of Lawyers"

Good. There is too many crappy lawyers already. The more we filter out the better. The bar exam should, frankly, be harder, not easier. And certainly not done away with.

[Brophy]

Everyone should be able to hire a bad lawyer or marry an ugly spouse because beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.

[not guilty]

As an aside, I almost always preferred to litigate against a capable lawyer. A bad one on the opposing side makes for too much work.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Did your clients prefer to have a capable, or incapable, lawyer on the other side?

[SMP0328]

An important new study by Washington University (St. Louis) legal scholar Kyle Rozema finds that bar exam requirements massively reduce the number of lawyers.

Duh! That's why every State, Territory, and DC has a bar exam. The reference to "minimal competence" is just a cover.

[Jett's Pop]

"even though it may not be in my self-interest to hold that view"

I don't think the bar exam has much effect on the supply of law professors. I know some who have never taken a bar exam.

[F.D. Wolf]

While I doubt many Americans would identify "shortage of lawyers" as a pressing problem (or a problem at all), I have a better idea:

Keep the bar exam and get rid of the law schools. Let's go back to letting people read for the law. A two-year apprenticeship would produce better lawyers than three years of law school (and would be a hell of a lot less expensive for those who wish to become lawyers). I would characterize law school, overall, as a colossal, very expensive waste of time that imparts few, if any, practical skills. Of course, it does produce a lot of cozy sinecures, so I don't imagine a lot of movement on this proposal.

More critical than the imaginary lawyer shortage is an actual doctor shortage, but I would hardly advocate for eliminating the medical boards.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Yes.

[Publius_2020]

> "While some might cheer that result, the main effect is to increase the cost and reduce the availability of legal services."

It reduces the availability of *bad* legal services. Anyone who has seen the performance of the lowest 20% of the bar understands that adding another 20% below that is not a good idea in a general sense.

That said, with respect to cost issues, especially at the low end, I think there are other solutions to create better legal aid and assistance programs for routine consumer-level legal issues.

[M L]

“The reduction in competition might be worth it if bar exams tested skills that practitioners must have in order to be effective lawyers. In reality, however, bar exams are largely a test of your ability to memorize thousands of arcane rules, the vast majority of which most practitioners don’t actually use. As co-blogger Orin Kerr puts it, “when [the bar exam] is over you can forget everything you just learned.” The reason you can do that is you are unlikely to ever use that knowledge again!”

Here, Ilya conflated “skills” with “knowledge.” Whoops!

Edit: He does go on to suggest that memorization isn’t a useful skill. Seems doubtful but maybe somewhat.

[M L]

I don’t know that the bar exam is really useful or worthwhile. However, I don’t think it meaningfully restricts the supply of legal services, nor does it benefit licensed lawyers, because the supply has always greatly exceeded the demand.

For years, Somin has been fond of just asserting this folksy little supposition, without bothering to offer any evidence or pay any attention to the actual numbers. He just ignores the fact that huge percentages of law school graduates, even those passing the bar, were never able to actually work as a lawyer, because there just weren’t that many jobs available or that much demand for legal services, compared to how many people law schools were pumping out. There has been more demand for law degrees than demand for lawyers, and law schools have been a profitable racket. However, I know law school numbers have gone down a bit in recent years, I haven’t looked at more recent data, it’s possible this has changed a bit.

[CommentMonkey]

I am struggling to understand why evidence that the bar exam excludes some people from practicing as lawyers is supposed to strengthen Somin's argument that the exam should be watered down or eliminated. Surely the educational and entrance requirements to practice as a brain surgeon operate to exclude X% of those who want to be brain surgeons. Yet no reasonable person thinks those barriers to entry should be eliminated.

The real question is whether some or all of the estimated 16% weeded out by the exam would be competent lawyers. There's reason for skepticism. Anyone who has taken the exam alongside law school classmates can probably attest that there's a decent, if not perfect, correlation between bar passage and performance in law school.

And as many others have pointed out, there is value in having an exam that requires extensive preparation, even if the exam contents don't necessarily have lasting relevance to most lawyers' practices. An awful lot of people go to law school despite ambivalence about going into law practice. Some of those decide it isn't worth the effort to take the bar exam and choose a different career. Others go into the practice of law and are deeply unhappy from day one. If the burden of studying for and passing the bar exam turns some such people away from a career in which they are destined to be unhappy, and thus ineffective, that might be a good thing.

I'm receptive to arguments for reforming bar exam content and doing away with or reducing law school degree requirements. But dumping another 16% of law school graduates into the profession each year, when that group is likely to be at the bottom of the barrel in terms of competence and motivation? I doubt that would materially benefit consumers of legal services.

[Brophy]

Anyone should be free to become a brain surgeon without government permission even though some might find it difficult to find customers.

[Ak Mike]

My take is two-fold.
First, I don't think that getting more lawyers admitted will necessarily result in more lawyers practicing. I think already a substantial proportion of those admitted don't get law jobs and wind up not being practicing lawyers.
Second, more lawyers will not likely result in a significant reduction in the cost of legal services. There are already a lot of lawyers practicing and if price competition were enough to make legal services more affordable, it would have already had that effect. The actual driver of high costs are the rules instituted by courts to make the litigation process more "fair." Huge costs of discovery and motion practice make it untenable for anyone to take a case of any complexity to court unless what is at stake is close to six figures. This affects rich and poor alike.
Sole practitioners with individual rather than corporate clients don't earn much more than police officers, insurance agents, and the like. If fees are driven down more such practitioners will leave the law and get a different job.

[bernard11]

I don’t think that getting more lawyers admitted will necessarily result in more lawyers practicing. I think already a substantial proportion of those admitted don’t get law jobs and wind up not being practicing lawyers.

Yes.

There is a problem here of some sort. Why do we have both a lot of lawyers not practicing and presumably a significant number of underserved potential clients?

IOW, why doesn't the market clear? My guess is that it's hard to make a living serving poor clients, and that most law school graduates who can't find a decent law job have other alternatives.

You are not going to solve this by creating more lawyers who can't make a living serving poor clients. What you have to do, ISTM, is figure out how to make the legal process cheaper, without affecting lawyers' income very much.

You would like, I think to reduce the friction in the system. I have no idea if this can be done, how to do it, or whether it would make a lot of difference.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Or perhaps, make it so that people can become lawyers without needing to spend $150,000 in tuition.

Perhaps...just eliminate the requirement to go to law school. Make it so if you pass the bar, you're fine to practice law. Abe Lincoln never went to law school.....

[bernard11]

You're not Abe Lincoln.

[Nestor33]

Let me get this straight: to make services more accessible to the least resourced and most vulnerable members of the community, we need an underclass of professionals that fails to meet today's minimum qualifications?

Why stop at law? After all, the poor need general contractors, doctors & dentists, stockbrokers and real estate agents too! Who needs a test when you can just look it up on youtube, ChatGPT or google it? As long as a paramedic has a decent internet connection, anyone can do it! And most of the knowledge is useless--how common are snakebites in the 'hood anyways?

As for the fly-by-night professional schools sure to pop up instantly--perhaps those for-profit diploma mills could also cater to underprivileged groups and underqualified students!

If only the Federal Government could step in with a lending program to facilitate this--I'm sure that it would end well for everyone involved. It's amazing nobody thought of this before.

Please.

[John F. Carr]

How much does a requirement to pass law school decrease the number of lawyers?

[FivebySixThree]

Depends on the state, not all require attendance at a law school to take the exam. In some states the bar determines if you are permitted based on how they interpret your character based on your past actions and associations.

If anything the law profession will truly live up to the idea of you get what you pay for. It will certainly lower the bar for who can be declared as unfit to represent a client, not at first but after awhile the proverbial bar will be so low that AI may just become the only acceptable course

[loki13]

I have to agree with what others, such as Publius and AkMike, have already said. This is the triumph of theory over observable evidence.

First, there is the issue that there are a number of people who have passed the bar and aren't practicing. Which means that the supply of attorneys isn't the problem.

Second, the biggest driver of cost that I've seen is the cost of litigation. Adding more attorneys doesn't solve that - instead, that would require structural reform of the legal system. Everyone knows that good attorneys can leverage the court system to drag out litigation and make it ruinously expensive ... and bad attorneys can do that unknowingly.

Third, the barrier to entry of a bar exam is so slight that it doesn't do much to keep out the bad practitioners as it is. Given the overall level of practice, and thinking about the worst attorneys I've seen that have passed the bar ... I can't even imagine how bad the people that didn't pass the bar are.

Maybe we should start with proposals to reform the legal system to make it less costly, and/or reform the bar disciplinary process so that it actually has teeth in preventing bad attorneys from continuing the practice of law, before we add even more terrible attorneys to the market?

[KenveeB]

In other news, water is wet. You can debate the relative merits of the Bar, but I don't think anyone doubts that it reduces the number of lawyers because that's the POINT. What a useless study.

[ReaderY]

Doubtless doctor and pilot licenses reduces the number of people who would otherwise be doctors and pilots by considerably more than 16%. If food and drugs didn’t have to show safety, a lot more would be on the market. If securities didn’t have requirements, there’d be a lot more things available to invest in. Etc.

Professor Somin’s logic is essentially circular. If you begin by assuming that doctor’s pilot’s, and lawyer licensing requirements (etc. etc.) are a load of hogwash, then of course everyone and everything they weed out is an injury to society and an injustice. If you instead even consider the possibility that there may be some value to the requirements, the house of cards tumbles.

[bernard11]

“Study Finds Bar Exam Requirements Greatly Reduce the Number of Lawyers”

Sounds like a headline from the Onion.

[Brophy]

The Onion doesn't write headlines like that anymore because someone might be offended. The only people who are offended by the Onion today are those that are looking for a good laugh.

[Vandalia]

One more point: He makes the point that the bar exam is a "memorization test."

However, I have heard law school professors who "graded" these exams say that you can completely make up a law or a legal rule, and as long as you apply your made up rule properly, you will be fine.

Any thoughts on if this is actually true?

[JimB 2]

Want an opinion from an old guy? I always thought the bar exams’ principal focus was to see if the applicant thought like a lawyer. Remember the legal syllogism? And secondarily, whether the applicant could write as a lawyer must. JimB, JD 1960.

[Flight-ER-Doc]

Yeah, passing the medical boards is a requirement that reduces the numbers of physicians too....

But would you want your brain tumor removed by someone who didn't pass them?

[Rossami]

The thing that makes legal services so expensive is not the modest barrier to entry that the bar exam represents but the mammoth barrier to entry that is the entire 'unauthorized practice of law' model.

Yes, you should pick good quality, competent counsel when you are in a high-risk legal situation. But the vast majority of "legal" tasks don't require more than some modest background and a strong attention to detail. Fixing that problem and forcing the existing lawyers to practice higher up in the value stack would drive total legal costs way down.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Somin has it backwards. Keep the Bar Exam. Eliminate the Law School.

Or rather, eliminate the requirement to graduate law school to take the bar. (Also, eliminate the "studying law" requirements in those few states that don't require law school degrees, but require excessive alternate certification).

Taking and passing the bar, alone, should entitle one to practice law. The cost in time and money for law school (3 years and $150,000) far exceeds the costs of the bar exam.

Other countries don't have such excessive requirements to practice law. And many of our greatest legal minds in the United States never went to law school. Jefferson, Lincoln, Marshall. All without an ounce of law school.

Eliminate the law school requirement to take the bar exam, and you'll see the number of lawyers go up dramatically. Undergraduate studies will quickly re-orient around "pre-law" programs designed to pass the bar exam. Other, smart individuals, will study for a few months to take the exam and pass. Skilled paralegals who already know the law backwards and forwards will be enabled to pass the law exam as well, without the pesky need to pay $150,000 for an education they largely already have.

Eliminate the law school. Keep the bar. If people still "want" to pay $150,000 for a law school, let them. But don't force others to, if they know better and just want to practice law.

(Whoops...just cost Somin his job. Guess that's not gonna work for him).

[JimB 2]

I took and passed the Virginia Bar during my last semester of law school. But was not admitted to the Bar until I graduated.

[myself]

It might make more sense to do what engineers do.

Fresh out of school you get a basic competency exam that makes you an "Engineer in Training" and authorizes you to work in the field in a limited capacity.

After several years of mentored experience you can take your PEng exam and become a full fledged Professional Engineer.

Perhaps all lawyers take a basic legal competency bar exam out of school that enables them to do a lot of basic everyday legal tasks.

After a few years of that they can go for the big exam/certification.

[AtR]

Clearly, we need tougher bar exams!

[Bruce Hayden]

I disagree. The arbitrary rules that Somin seems to so dislike are, for the most part, the outline of the law, in different areas of the law, that a minimally competent attorney should know to practice law. 33 years since my first bar exam (and passage), I still fall back on those rules when dealing with areas of the law that I didn’t practice in. No matter how specialized your practice is (and as a patent attorney, mine was quite specialized), you inevitably run into issues in other areas of law. And, I think that it is important to know enough in these other areas to recognize problems and protect clients and friends.

My theory is that anyone who considers the contents of the bar exam to be the memorization of an arbitrary set of rules, does not understand the law sufficiently well to be allowed to practice it.

As to lowering the standards, by eliminating the bar exam - my experience is that almost all ABA LS grads who fail it, do so because they didn’t buckle down and study hard enough. Several guys, who were just getting to much sex, some people who froze the first time due to stress, a woman with kids whose husband wasn’t taking his share of parenting, etc. Almost all buckled down, studied hard, and passed a subsequent test - though several took an employer mandate to motivate them.

One additional thought - the bar exam is what keeps law schools honest. They have to teach the core classes competently, and not get distracted by modern trends and fads. Classes like Con Law seem esp susceptible to this, with profs teaching what they want the law to be, as contrasted to what it actually is.

[ReaderY]

It seems all too common, in political “debate” of this sort, for one side’s “bureaucratic red tape” and “unnecessariy regulations” that self-evidentally ought to be done away with to be the other side’s “vital national interests” that are self-evidently the only thing standing between people being able to lead a normal life and death, destruction, and oblivion.

And since each side regards its position as obviously self-evident, neither side considers the other’s position even worth discussing. So there’s no debate, just monologues.

Professor Somin’s argument here illustrates the problem. The premise that anyone interested in actually persuading anyone would most want to support by reason and evidence is his view that bar exams are meaningless, add no value, and those who pass them make no better lawyers than those who fail. But he treats this highly debatable premise as self-evident, so obvious to everyone as not to even need mention, let alone discussion or reasoned, evidence-based argument.

[ReaderY]

Will mention that the fact Professor Somin doesn’t see fit to support this premise by any form of reason or evidence could, I think fairly, be counted against him. The objective observer of debates could reasonably conclude that, like the guest on Monty Python’s “Stake Your Claim” sketch, Professor Somin’s claim relied on hoping that we wouldn’t make that particular point, and falls to the ground if we do.

[Longtobefree]

From the ads I see, lawyers only do accident injury cases.
How hard can it be? All they need is a good screening program to weed out cases that might actually call for more then a couple of negotiation letters to an insurance company.
They used to do wills, but the web does those now.

[arch1]

This may be naive, but rather than a huge memory drill, why not have a bar exam which tests abilities and knowledge which *will* be useful in practice? Such a test could for example investigate the subject’s understanding of and facility with various modes of legal reasoning without requiring the memorization of a gazillion useless details.

[Apatheist ಠ_ರೃ]

Um, no shit. Occupational liscenising creates barriers to entry in a marketplace. Did this really require "[a]n important new study" to figure that out or did you think us lawyers are exempt from the same economic rules as other professions previously?

[fmorgan98]

And what, your'e surprised, and shocked, shocked, absolutely shocked at this? The nature of all associations is to benefit the members, and thereby restrict competition under the guise of benefits to the public. Teachers unions...case in point.

[kjon]

How about we significantly reduce the number of laws and make those that remain understandable at the 8th grade level.