Yesterday, the Pope Center released a study on legal education in North Carolina, written by law professors Andrew Morriss (University of Illinois) and William Henderson (Indiana University). They find that NC has the lowest ratio of lawyers to citizens of any state and argue that we’d be better off if the market for legal education and services was not impeded.
The impeder: the State Bar of NC, which makes it far more difficult than necessary for an individual to learn and practice law here.
I comment on their paper here (with a link to the paper).
The Center held a luncheon for the release of the paper and I wound up sitting next to former Duke Law School Dean Paul Carrington. He said that several decades ago, he participated in a Ford Foundation project that wound up recommending that law school be cut down to two years. Why wasn’t that idea adopted? Because the big shots in the legal profession figured that since medical school takes four years, it would be too much of a blow to the prestige of the legal profession to admit that lawyers could be produced in only two.
Now, there’s a really good reason to make people spend an extra year and a lot of money in school.
