Trouble at the Bar
Occupational licensing is often deployed by industries to limit job competition, and it is no different with the American Bar Association. I was joined by Clifford Winston, senior fellow at Brookings Institution’s Economic Studies program, applied microeconomist, and author of Trouble at the Bar.
Together, we will take a close look at the adverse effects that the ABA regulation has on the legal market and the economy as a whole — including the increase in cost, reduction in quality, and the limit of access to legal services for the general population. Clifford argues that by deregulating the legal industry, there would be a mutual benefit to both lawyers, prospective lawyers, and society in general.
TRANSCRIPT
Bob Zadek 00:35
This morning, we will do a deep dive into what’s wrong with the profession of law. I have been a practicing lawyer for 54 years. I can think of no better way to have occupied my space on Earth, but I find something’s wrong with the practice of law. It’s not just the issue of how the practice of law is carried on and regulated in the country, because that would seem to just affect lawyers. It’s a deeper issue because the maladministration of the law profession — the organization of the practice of law — has a profound effect upon every single American. Not only that, it affects Americans indirectly because it actually affects the proper functioning of our government.
With that introduction I’m delighted to welcome you to my show this morning Cliff Winston. Cliff is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Economic Studies program. He is an applied microeconomist. Cliff has recently written a book that caught my attention entitled — frighteningly enough — Trouble at the Bar. Cliff, welcome to the show this morning.
Clifford Winston 03:22
Thank you for having me and for covering this topic.
A Microeconomist Looks at the Law Profession
Bob Zadek 03:26
Cliff, you’re a microeconomist. Tell us in a few words, how the approach of microeconomics differs from a macroeconomist, so they can follow your profound interest in this subject and in related topics.
Clifford Winston 03:57
Microeconomists tend to focus on specific markets and industries, whereas macroeconomists talk about the overall economy — GDP growth, unemployment, inflation. Microeconomists will look at specific markets and industries and the policy issues that relate to those entities, whereas your macroeconomists will largely focus on federal government policy.
Bob Zadek 04:33
As a microeconomist, how did you happen to stumble upon or, maybe more directly, put the profession of law into your crosshairs?
Clifford Winston 05:11
I began my career as an economist studying transportation industries, which were an exciting industry to study in 1970 because they were undergoing the transition to deregulation. They had been regulated for many years. There were lots of concerns about their performance. It was widely believed that deregulation would improve performance. This was a time when economists were studying the effects of deregulation on airlines, railroads, and the trucking industry, etc. I launched a research program and learned that my initial perspective on what was going to happen weren’t quite right, and you had to take a long run view.
I turned to other areas, and quite a natural one to me was the legal profession, or generally industries that were subject to entry barriers in the form of what we call “occupational licensing.”
Who is Harmed by Occupational Licensing?
Bob Zadek 06:39
Let me just set the stage for the regulation of the practice of law, so that the audience will know what is the world you direct your attention to. Lawyers in all 50 States are prohibited from practicing law unless they are licensed. I consider the whole word license to be a despicable word. I hate to even use it. Two adults need permission from the government in order for one informed adult to not be coerced or threatened or defrauded, and to hire another adult to do an activity which is otherwise lawful. They cannot transact business together without permission of the government… That’s what a license is. That I find abhorrent, but here we are. Lawyers have to be licensed.
Not only that, in order to be licensed in most states, lawyers have to attend an accredited law school. You can’t just go to any law school. States vary, but in general, that’s the practice. Law schools can only be accredited if they are awarded the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval by one or the other of a regulatory or quasi-regulatory agency, such as the American Bar Association.
Lawyers not only have to get a license, but they have to go to an American Bar Association. If lawyers do things that the regulatory agency finds to be improper or unethical, lawyers can lose their license, and they can no longer practice law. That’s the scheme in which Cliff now directed his attention and has written at least two books, and I’m sure a bunch of papers on the subject as well.
Now, Cliff, while the ABA limits those who can be lawyers, that means that certain people who otherwise might want to be lawyers and might think they are competent to do so, are not allowed to do it. The licensing regime would seem to adversely affect only those people who want to be lawyers, but who the government prohibits from doing so. While sure that’s too bad for those people, the adverse effects are narrow. You wouldn’t have written your books if it was only because you felt bad that certain people couldn’t be lawyers. Your problem with that regime is that it has a far more profound effect upon all of the non-lawyers and people who don’t want to be lawyers. What is the broader adverse effect that drew your attention? What is the broader adverse effect caused by that licensing regime?
Clifford Winston 10:18
Let’s take it a little slower from the top because you’re actually weaving in an important theme about regulations that exist, not just the legal profession, but really, for all industries. That’s on the surface — well-intentioned aims of the regulators. In the case of the legal profession, you have the licensing and the bar exams, and going to the accredited law school. You have the good intention of making sure they are quality lawyers.
The reason why people involved in licensing felt that this was important is because laypeople, such as myself, would not be able to distinguish a good lawyer from a bad lawyer. There wouldn’t be the requisite information or they themselves just weren’t smart enough to figure it out, or lawyers are able to deceive them about what they could do for them, so on and so forth. The feeling was, “Look, if we only let high quality people in, then this will solve what we call an information problem.”
That really sets the stage of the bigger question than what are we trying to accomplish? See, too often we get in policy debates, we don’t step back and ask the fundamental question, “What are we trying to do?”
The answer to this question is often the answer to almost any policy question — we’re trying to maximize the net benefits to American society that the legal profession is providing. That’s what we’re really trying to do. Presumably, then we have policies that attempt to do that. As indicated, a concern was that to maximize benefits, we had to make sure we had quality lawyers. As we’ll get into more detail, we’ll find out a couple of things.
One, that these entry barriers, licensing requirements of going to law school did very little in terms of improving the quality of legal services, and they had considerable costs. This is not now a prelim to get into your question. The initial costs and the ones that we see in other industries where we have entry barriers is raising the price of the service. You cannot get everybody to compete. In particular, I’ll argue that you can’t even get the lowest cost innovative suppliers, so prices for legal services are high.
It’s also the case that the quantity or access to legal services is much lower despite the view that people think there are too many lawyers. The truth is there are not enough lawyers.
Finally, I think the important part of extending this analysis is that in the process of having these entry barriers, we’ve siloed lawyers. Lawyers are isolated. They go through a particular training and exposure among other lawyers, but they don’t engage in my view sufficiently with other disciplines — certainly economics, but other disciplines as well. This really affects them in their positions in making policy both in courts and in general in government. It’s really this last issue — the legal profession’s engagement with other disciplines and the efficacy of their policymaking, which I think is an underappreciated byproduct of the entry barriers and restrictions on practicing law.
Bob Zadek 14:18
Your first point was that licensing could help consumers make intelligent purchasing decisions about purchasing legal services. If it ever was true, that need is incidentally less true today than any other time in economic history because in the old days, all one had to go on was reputation. Reputation was very local. It was a reputation in the village, in the community. That was some guidance, but not much. Today, information about the quality of anybody you’re going to hire, or anything you’re going to buy is almost infinite with the Internet, and with access to so many platforms. Anybody can learn all you need to know about any good or service on the planet. You can get information, and you simply have to make the right decision.
Clifford Winston 15:35
It would happen immediately. You have a bad meal, and everybody in the world knows about it.
Bob Zadek 15:43
While you’re eating it, you’re texting and writing a review.
When Good Intentions are Note Enough
Bob Zadek:
You mentioned good intentions. Everybody has private beef about bad government policy, the inefficiency of government and the like. Every single policy that people complain about the most is born of good intentions. Let’s just stipulate that there’s almost no reason to support a policy that people mean well. Taking money to give it to somebody who needs it more is a well-intended policy, perhaps, but it’s wrong on so many grounds.
Clifford Winston 16:38
I just want to be careful on this one point here. I would say ostensibly good intentions. There was never any evidence when the process began of licensing lawyers that there were problems in information that people could not distinguish good lawyers from bad lawyers. There’s not a shred of evidence of that. There’s a debate as to why lawyers were licensed. Certainly one of them was to keep certain people out of the legal profession or, arguably at least, make it harder to get in to increase wages of lawyers. I think it’s not only the good intentions, but what probably is often worse is that it’s the ostensible good intentions, when in fact, they have no good intentions at all. It’s just outright rent-seeking or even discrimination that’s really driving a lot of these policies.
Bob Zadek 17:39
In law, medicine, and other professions it also creates somewhat of a mystique — it suggests you shouldn’t try to acquire information on your own or from somebody else, it’s just too complicated. You have to use a lawyer who is cloaked in this mysterious wealth of information that non-lawyers couldn’t possibly have, and therefore you had better stay away. Therefore, their stature in the community is enhanced by creating that mentality by the buying public.
Clifford Winston 18:22
It is a wrong idea. You’re lulled into a false sense of security. That is, you hear people who have graduated from this law school, and they pass the first time in their Bar Exam, and you interpret that as an imprimatur of quality. You can be lulled into thinking this guy is gonna be good. Obviously, the proof is in the pudding. What do we really know about this lawyer’s performance?
Why a Healthy Legal Profession Matters
Bob Zadek 18:51
I’m now going to give a consumer advisory. The state of California has told the entire country that I am competent to defend you in a death penalty appeal. According to the state of California, I’m your guy. Let me tell you, do not hire me to do that. Not only have I not been in a courtroom, I don’t even have a suit, but the state of California says, “Go ahead. Hire, Bob. He’ll keep you out of what they use to execute people these days. He’ll keep you alive. Trust him. He’s a licensed lawyer.”
Utterly absurd. This commentary relates to every licensed profession from barber to surgeon, but you have chosen to write about lawyers not at random. You had felt the adverse effects on the public through the maladministration of the occupation of law has a more profound and deeper effect. Tell us why you have chosen to write about law, not, for example, about medicine or engineering or electricians.
Clifford Winston 20:19
I would say three things. First, access to legal services. It is amazing how few people realize that lawyers only serve a tiny share of the population. Most people just cannot afford a lawyer. It’s too expensive. They don’t even know how to get a lawyer, and so on and so forth. These are people in situations where you don’t need somebody who went to Harvard Law School to get help. You could get some simple advice, even guidance on how to use Legal Zoom. I report evidence in my book about estimates of how much of the public really does not have access to legal services — 80 plus percent, and then evidence pointing out that in that case, people then defend themselves. They lose much more often than people who do have legal representation. You have discussions of people who are facing immigration issues. Again, when they have to defend themselves, they lose at a much higher rate than when they’re able to get some lawyer to help them. That’s the first one, which is really important. At a time, when we are really increasingly concerned in public discussions about inequality and helping out with the lower part of the income distribution, one would think access to legal services would really be a crucial issue up at the top to help people out because legal issues are often an important source of their problems. This is a problem that is the access to legal services.
The second one, which we’ll get into is the performance of courts, in particular ideology on the Supreme Court. How serious a problem is that? How could opening up the legal profession to have greater interaction with professionals and experts in other disciplines help reduce that problem and lead to more effective decisions and more socially helpful decisions?
Finally, just public policy in general. You mentioned your concerns that everyone has about public policy. The real challenge is why does this persist? This is not new. For decades, people have been saying, government policy this, government policy that, yet it goes on. We rarely see fundamental improvements in government policy. Why is that one of the roles of the legal profession in contributing both to the efficacy of public policy and the persistence of poor public policies. Those are the three headlines that are related to the research that I’m doing.
The Problem of Ideology
Bob Zadek 23:23
You observe that you felt the court was too ideological in making its decisions. It didn’t focus on the effects on everyday people. It didn’t pay attention to economic consequences. It made decisions without regard to the overall positive or negative effect of its decisions. Is that a fair summary of that point?
Clifford Winston 24:32
I think we can just distill it into a point that judges in general are ideological, because they can’t be anything else. That is they really don’t approach law from any common foundation for making decisions. So ultimately, they’ll go on intuition with their own self-reflections on various topics, and then they rationalize and just say, “Okay, I can find some legal argument to justify this and say, here’s what I think.” What is troubling about ideology, especially these days, is that it’s lining up in political ways. We are really seeing the major concern that judges, if not justices, are politicians in fine robes. They’re just basically reflecting the views of the president that appointed them. That’s the concern. The question is one, what was the evidence on that? And two, what possibly could we do to change that trend?
Bob Zadek 25:49
Ideology is a tricky word. Your book was an economic study, not a philosophical study. It wasn’t necessary to do a deepest dive into ideology. What I couldn’t understand and found myself wondering about is whether a judge (they’re generally called conservative, I hate the phrase, and I don’t think that’s appropriate because the audience will think that way) is a conservative or perhaps originalist, the originalist judge says you interpret that individuals possess certain rights that the government cannot infringe upon. Even those rights may impair the government taking action, and more progressive judges and politicians believe that those rights tend to interfere with the administration of government. Woodrow Wilson probably started that modern way of thinking… Teddy Roosevelt slightly before him. Those people believe that a government of experts knows best. If rights are trampled upon just a wee bit, it’s for a common good. I couldn’t understand from your writing, whether a judge who is strongly protective of individual rights, free speech, freedom of assembly, due process, whether that’s being ideological, or whether that’s the very job of a judge. I couldn’t understand when mere adherence to the law is just that and when it becomes ideological as you use it.
Clifford Winston 27:57
To avoid that problem, what I wanted to focus on, which was quantitative, is to look at business cases, where, to me, a reasonable interpretation of ideology is that you will have what we call a conservative judges and justices siding with business as part of Republican Party’s general support of business and liberal justices generally opposing business in cases before the court. Even though I agree that things can get muddy, if you study business cases, those are going to be much cleaner. There is reason to see that there’s going to be a split or at least in theory.
What I did in the book was actually tested — if you look at business cases, over time, in both the Rehnquist courts and the Roberts courts, once we control for other factors, do we see the conservative justices lining up and having a greater likelihood of a vote in a case in favor of business and the liberal judges justice, all else constant, lining up voting against business? When we do that, what do we see?
Sure enough, yes, there was a very sharp difference between these justices on the business cases, but not only that, the split has grown over time that the split existed in the Rehnquist court, it’s gone even larger in the Roberts Court. That obviously is my concern that clearly these are what we call ideology or preference variables for these justices are very important and they’ve gotten even more important over time. We see this, obviously, in other ways. This is not a study that I did, but I report one that somebody else did. They looked at sentencing. They found that sentencing for blacks who were convicted of crimes, holding all other influences constant, Republican appointed judges gave out much longer sentences than Democrat appointed justice judges. These are concerns that there’s something else, a preference, an ideology, all interchanges, those words that may be better, are coming into decision making.
Bob Zadek 30:53
When you pick sentencing, a good example, though, it’s not a business issue. You don’t reach a conclusion that the Republicans are wrong in long sentences or that Democratically appointed justices are wrong in overly short sentences, you just observe the dynamic because you studied the effects, and you tried to isolate the causes. You have concluded, as an economist, that putting aside who’s right and who’s wrong, the fact is that one can predict results based upon ideology, and that in and of itself, is wrong. You’re not taking a position.
Clifford Winston 31:40
That’s a very important point. Yes, it is certainly another step. Yes, these preferences and ideologies are at work, what then are the implications? That’s much harder. I make it clear in the book that there’s not yet evidence to say, for example, in these business cases, that this is really hurting industry or helping industry. It’s hard to believe if this is what’s driving an awful lot of decision making that that’s a good thing, especially when you start layering that on top of other hard evidence we do have about the efficacy of public policy, and trust in regulation, and so on and so forth.
Just because someone is making decisions based on ideology or their own personal preferences doesn’t necessarily mean that the policies and decisions are harmful. On the other hand, you do not think this is where we actually get good results. Then when you layer that on top of the evidence that we do have that there’s so many inefficiencies with public policies. It is something that I think is concerning and worthy. Let me get to the punch line, my recommendation is that courts now start working with expert panels, contrary to the belief of lawyers. Law is just simply not sufficient. It is not rich enough, it is not developed and developed enough to really guide society alone on public policies. There are other disciplines that are equally as important, and really need to be integrated more often, much more often than is the case now, to help out with law.
The Proper Role of Courts
Bob Zadek 33:42
I’m so glad you just said that. I was trying to figure out how to segue into that — what you call the punch line — which is the need for pragmatists, for experts in underlying policy to help courts decide. You made reference to Judge Posner, who has written extensively about law and economics. He’s quite a brilliant jurist and has written a great number of books. You cite him in the book. You cite Posner, as saying he wished the judges had more pragmatic policy based decisions, and that lawyers with that education can help the court. What I thought about is I worried and I think I’d like to close the discussion of the courts on this, but I really would like your comment, I worry that in asking that judges have a more pragmatic approach, I read pragmatic in as being non-legal, and then I jumped to Cliff and this is my point. Aren’t you asking judges to be legislators? It’s the legislature’s job to have hearings and do deep dives and to make policy decisions, and the court doesn’t rule on whether legislation is good. It only rules on whether it is constitutional. Aren’t you expanding the mission statement of the courts to be a super legislature?
Clifford Winston 35:33
Let me introduce two very important concepts, which really separate economists from the legal profession and lawyers, and this notion of really what we’re getting at in terms of making pragmatic decisions.
That is the words “prospective” and “retrospective” assessments of the impact or effect of your decisions. That is economists look at any policy decision as something if you’re going to recommend that you do something or you’re going to find for a particular plaintiff or defendant on on a particular issue in a way, it is important and desirable to perform prospective assessments is, what do you think the fact of this decision policy, etc. will be when you actually subject it to an empirical analysis.
Then retrospective assessments that after you have done it, you look back, and you say, what are the effects of these decisions? That is essential to economic analysis in actually shaping policy and providing guidance. That is something lawyers are not trained to do. I don’t even think they really understand what I’m getting at. You just learn the law, you apply it, but you’re pointing out to me, there’s an assumption made, or there may be an assumption made that ideology is bad. There’s also an assumption made that law is good, that when you follow the law, as you say, you made a good decision.
You’re not then looking forward and saying, “Hey, I get a prospective assessment. Look, this is how things are going to turn out empirically, and they’re going to be good.”
Or you’re not saying, “Hey, if you subject this to a retrospective assessment, then you’re fine. Yes, this was the right thing.” Far from it. You’re just saying, “The law is good, I’m wiping my hands, this policy analysis is not for us.”
But wait a minute, everything you’re doing is policy analysis. Just because you don’t subject it to a retrospective or a prospective analysis doesn’t mean that I can’t do it. In the process of doing it, I’m going to reveal that these are poor policies. I think that is really what we’re getting at, is to use the tools of policy analysis, and the incredible advances in data collection, in computer power, and statistical techniques to inform your decisions, and be able to then defend them when you start bringing in a broader set of issues that really will be brought in if you’re ever conducting a retrospective and prospective analysis. Let me just close with one very, very short, but undoubtedly, explosive point.
We’re looking forward to the Supreme Court making a decision about an abortion case coming up. Lawyers will look at this and say, “We just want to follow the law.”
Economists are going to look at this and they’re going to say, “Why don’t you ask what we know about the effect of abortion on education completion of mothers, unemployment, family formation, crime, you name it. That is the big difference. Those issues matter. These are not things that for the most part are really part of decision making in the legal profession.
Bob Zadek 39:30
That’s your closing. I want to ask you in a second about how regulation or deregulation would improve what you see to be a problem in the administration of justice, but just to respond. It’s just a case of self-control. I can’t bite my tongue. I would say, “No,” the courts should consider none of that. That’s for the legislature. The court simply decides whether individuals have a constitutional right to have an abortion or whether that is a right protected by the Constitution. The word does not appear. It is a court’s job to figure out by application, simply by reading the Constitution and its precedents. I know you hate precedents. We’ll get to that in a second. It’s the courts job just to figure that out. The legislature’s job is to see where abortion fits into the needs of society and the will of their electorate. That’s how I would divide that.
Clifford Winston 40:58
You cannot be serious that all the issues that I’ve mentioned are not going to enter into the mind of a jurist. They will find the law to justify deciding it on those grounds without ever even mentioning them, and just saying, “I’m following the law.” That’s one of the great things that Posner would say, “The way I often decide cases is I figured out the economics — I figured out what is really the best economic argument to make and justification for deciding the case. I then go back and say, ‘Okay, how do I interpret the law just to justify my economic argument?’ I can do it.”
That is dividing the line between the judicial system and the legislative system and thinking that one side doesn’t step over into the other side. They do, and they do it all the time.
How to Improve the Legal Profession
Bob Zadek 42:05
I love this discussion. I just want to continue it. I’m not going to because there’s so much else to cover. Bring us back to the book, having made the observation that you are troubled by the decision making process in the courts. It’s the process you are concerned about. Judges are human and will stipulate as to that. You devote the last chapter to policy reforms to improve the legal profession and benefit the nation. That’s the title of the last chapter. Focusing only on the operation of the court system, in general, the Supreme Court, in particular, how would your policy solutions make the problem or cause a problem to diminish?
Clifford Winston 43:10
The general theme is that I really want the legal profession and lawyers to be less siloed. I want them to integrate much more with people in other professions. I want this opportunity to start at the beginning of their education. What I call for is deregulation of the legal profession at all levels. This begins with education. The American Bar Association is free to exist. I would also hope that other bar associations develop, and they compete with the American Bar Association. Lawyers are free to join any and every one they want, or none. There is absolutely no requirement of any legal education, no control, whatsoever. The market is going to determine that, meaning then there can be undergraduate programs in law. You’re in college, you’re majoring in political science, you can say, “Hey, I think I’m also going to major in law or economics.” You can start getting exposure to law as an undergraduate. Let’s face it, the material isn’t that hard. This is not physics. This is not advanced math. I don’t think there’s any really intellectual reason why you cannot start offering undergraduate programs in law which we obviously do see abroad, where they do have such programs.
We start with that. Then we say, “Look, we will not have any requirements. On practice. You can go to an online law school. You can go to a vocational law school, You can get your undergraduate degree. You can go to your three year law school, so on and so forth, you can take bar exams.” Again, they’re allowed, but they’re not required. Again, we will let the market determine who has to become a lawyer.
Let me at least get to the first point on access to justice. We are going to have just a much broader, heterogeneous group of people practicing law. The prices are going to reflect that. The access to service is going to reflect that.
In terms of then improving public policy, what I envision and I’m sure would develop is much more specialized programs offered by law schools and universities in general, anticipating that people now are going to track themselves or have specializations where they will offer joint degrees in law, economics, social sciences, so on and so forth. For people who are looking to go into government policy work, that will explicitly be a program — not something that the ABA is going to turn down and say, “No, you need three years of study of law.”
It’ll be a mix of all those courses, and really will be focused much more vigorously on the concerns I’ve raised about understanding prospective and retrospective assessments of policy. This is the start of it. You can imagine them. They’ll be programs for people who want to do science and law, and engineering and law. Just to preview, as we look ahead about the importance of artificial intelligence and big data, you’ll see people who actually then look to enroll in programs that make use of artificial intelligence and big data in legal practice and specialize in that, and then become part of law firms. It’s just much broader, heterogeneous education, heterogeneous participants, that I think is going to be very helpful to the legal profession and thinking more broadly, about policy issues.
When they’re in their particular positions, as judges, justices, or whatever, I would hope they’d be much more open to what I call expert panels. That is saying, “Let us engage with specialists in certain areas. As we now know, there are many things that interact with law. It’d be good to talk with certain people about these things. To a certain extent, we have that now. With virtual communications between lawyers, between justices, and people on the outside, this will make it more transparent and hopefully more rigorous. I also believe that much more exposure to these other disciplines, other professions, and thinking about it more as policy analysis will translate into the policymaking community when people are really in the legislative position. They learn once and for all because this is really how we need to think about this and what we really know about the effects of public policies, which really are laws. That’s my vision is opening things up to more heterogeneous participants, more heterogeneous forms of education, and hopefully making lawyers less siloed. I think they are more effective in their contributions to America.
Bob Zadek 48:40
If you could hear a smile, you would have heard a big, broad grin on my face as you’re speaking because you are even more right than you appreciate, in my opinion. Here’s why I’m saying that. I’ve been a lawyer for a long time. I have discovered, just as you have mentioned, that the law part of my profession (I represent businesses), it’s easy to get. You practice law for a bunch of years. If you work at it, you will understand the law early in your career. You will incrementally get smarter every day if you’re diligent, but you will understand the law. For the rest of your life, you spend learning everything else to make your services valuable to your client. If I were just a lawyer, I could be replaced in a heartbeat probably by somebody who charges $15 an hour less and probably for the same quality of work, but it’s the other stuff. The very stuff that you are seeking to have lawyers be free to learn, encouraged to learn. It’s the other stuff that really makes the profession add value. I come to it from a business standpoint, you from a broader policy standpoint. We reach exactly the same point that just the law is insufficient really to be a valuable addition to society.
Clifford Winston 50:26
It is just not enough. That’s not an insult. If you understand policy analysis, you realize how complicated it is. This is not you taking anything away from the law. It just needs to be enriched, and you need to work with just a broader set of people. Also, I don’t think that people appreciate how young economics is. I mentioned empirical analysis. I mentioned these kinds of empirical studies. We’ve barely been doing them for very long. We’re only getting better and better at them. If you look back to the 1960s, it was hardly any of this kind of stuff. People weren’t doing empirical assessments of this law, that law, so on and so forth. It really took off more in the 70s. then, so we’ve been doing this for about 50 years, which is a very young policy science, if you will.
Bob Zadek 51:21
This is Bob Zadek. I was speaking with Cliff Winston. Cliff has written Trouble at the Bar, a fascinating study of inviting the deregulation of the profession of law and many other professions to follow. Cliff explains in his book, how deregulation of the profession of law is essential for the proper administration of governmental policy for courts to reach their right decisions. Please read Cliff’s book and follow his writings. If you’ve enjoyed this show, please indicate on the podcast any suggestions you might have to make our show better and rate us if you see fit to do so. Thank you so much to Cliff and to my audience for spending this Sunday morning with us. Have a good rest of your Sunday.
LINKS:
- AMAZON: Trouble at the Bar: An Economics Perspective on the Legal Profession and the Case for Fundamental Reform, March 2, 2021
- Clifford Winston
RELATED SHOWS:
- Demystifying the Supreme Court with David Kaplan, April 7, 2019
- Walter Olson, the “Guru of Tort Reform,” on Arbitration, December 6, 2015
