There's a piece in the L.A. Times about lawyers. Apparently, the over-accreditation of law schools by the American Bar Association (ABA) has led to an oversupply of lawyers, leading to thousands of law school graduates unable to find jobs.
Dershowitz likes to tell this one: A newly-minted JD finds a town with no lawyer and hangs out his shingle. Time passes, but no business comes his way. He's about to take down his shingle, when another lawyer moves to town, and suddenly both have all the business they can handle.
George Bernard Shaw: "Every profession is a conspiracy against the layman." Shaw doubtless had just read Dickens's horror story about lawyers, Bleak House.
The 1995 consent decree between Justice and the ABA, constraining the ABA from throttling law school accreditations (which the ABA ignored anyway), was done with a wink and a nod. Lawyers-to-lawyers. (The Ma Bell breakup was the same: "Oh, hurt me so good!") The ABA wants an unlimited stream of lawyers coming on line. Organizations having a life of their own, the ABA seeks ever to grow its membership and thus its lobby. The plethora of lawyers in legislatures, in the seats and in the corridors, is why tort reform has so little chance of passage.
Lawyers are at once high priests and gangsters, a lethal combination for any civilization:
High priests, because they have gamed the system so that no one may approach the law except through them. The bar is a freemasonry, with robes and jargon and secret handshakes and old-boy networks.
Gangsters, because we "need" lawyers to protect us from other lawyers, i.e. the American legal system is most monstrous protection racket in history.
