It’s the Law Schools Stupid! Explaining the Continuing Increase in the Number of Lawyers

Abstract

Many countries around the world have experienced sharp increases in the number of legal professionals over the last 40 to 50 years. In this paper, I focus on the role of the gatekeepers which in most countries today are the institutions that provide education and training for those hoping to enter the profession. I argue that while the profession may have an incentive to control the “production of producers,” the educational institutions do not share this incentive. While this argument has been made previously, in this paper I seek to draw out the implications of the institutional incentives, both with regard to how the institutions operate to supply education and training, and with regard to the impact on the demand for the education and training the institutions provide. The discussion considers develops in a range of both common law and civil law countries.

Keywords: legal education, legal profession