Too Many Lawyers‘ Litigation in Italian Civil Courts

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the number of lawyers and civil litigation across Italian provinces over the period 2000-2005. We first document the existence of a positive correlation between the number of lawyers and litigation. We then employ a 2SLS approach to verify the existence of a causal effect. We use as an exogenous source of variation for the number of lawyers the differences among provinces in the proximity to a law school in 1975. Our results show that the number of lawyers has a positive effect on litigation and that the magnitude of this effect is large.

Keywords: civil justice, litigation, market for lawyers

JEL Classification: K41, J44, L84