Ain't that the truth.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia thinks we’re “‘wasting’ too many of our ‘best minds’” in the law. “I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. ... And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.”

But writing on the Volokh Conspiracy Web site, Ilya Somin, an assistant professor at George Mason School of Law, says the justice is only “half-right.”

“We are indeed devoting more of our ‘best minds’ to law than we ideally should; perhaps more of our merely average minds too,” he said. “In civil law, we have a massive tort law suit system and hundreds of state and federal regulatory agencies that issue mindbogglingly complex regulations that require interpretation by experts if you want to avoid costly liability. And of course we also have an extremely complex tax system that requires many people to hire tax lawyers if they want to keep the IRS off their backs.

“The best way to safely reduce the number of lawyers is to cut back on the number of laws,” he concludes.

Source: Ilya Somin, “Too Many Lawyers or Too Many Laws?” The Volokh Conspiracy, October 6, 2009

Via http://www.heartland.org/

Ms. Somin is absolutely right too; the way to get rid of lawyers is to stop passing ridiculous laws. 

Lawyers most certainly do not produce anything; Justice Scalia is correct. I practiced for a little over a year before I got laid off when the economy tanked, but I was on my way out anyway. There is very, very little good in tort law as far as I'm concerned. I was starting to lose sleep at night when I contemplated the fact that my job did nothing but transfer money from producers to the unproductive. That is not to say that all of my clients were unproductive, far from it. But the net result of my cases, whether settled or tried, was to simply clog the court, redistribute wealth and line the pockets of my bosses. And don't get me wrong, I liked my bosses as people, I really did. I just saw nothing productive in what I was doing.

This isn't to say that I've completely given up on my profession. I haven't. I still believe that the law, properly understood and properly administered, is arguably the most important difference between the philosophy of liberty on which the United States is founded and every form of collectivism. Nobody is above the law here.

Which leads to Ms. Somin's point that the sheer number of lawyers is more or less a direct consequence of the number of laws. The regulations of the United States contained in the Federal Register consist of more than 80,000 pages. This is unbelievable. That's literally 80,000 pages of morass that people simply would never have the time to decipher and thus 80,000 more reasons to need a lawyer.

Think there's too many lawyers now? Wait until ObamaCare's 1,000 pages become law. You won't be able to sneeze without a lawyer asking you if you want to sue.

Russ