The ABA Journal has this interesting thought attributed to Justice Scalia. Asked to comment on whether the quality of advocacy before the U.S. Supreme Court was too low, Justice Scalia is quoted as saying:
“I used to have just the opposite reaction. I used to be disappointed that so many of the best minds in the country were being devoted to this enterprise.
“I mean there’d be a ... public defender from Podunk, you know, and this woman is really brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?
“I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table, and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.”
Justice Scalia is at his provocative best here, forcing us to wonder whether our legal system now pervasively controls so many aspects of our society that too many of the best minds have to go into the profession.
Richard says:
Judge Silberman has the same thoughts–see his comments on The National Review web site at “Uncommon Knowledge.”
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October 5, 2009, 9:18 amRandom Commenter says:
I think you have to be a member of the legal profession to blithely presume that “many of our best minds” have gone into it. Yes, I’m being provocative, but I often get the impression some members of the legal academy don’t get out much.
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October 5, 2009, 9:21 amOren says:
Producing and maintaining a stable forum for adjudication of disputes is an enormous tangible benefit for the productive part of society. Aside from the garden-variety contract law stuff that never goes to the Supreme Court, we have a body of law protecting producers from the destructive whims of various legislatures as well — also a huge benefit.
Moreover, there is massive tangible benefit to a functioning criminal justice system. The true cost of wrongful imprisonment (including letting the true perp reoffend at will) must be astronomical.
Finally, an affluent society might rationally decide to spend some of accumulated productivity on intangible benefits like civil liberty, even beyond the point where that liberty results in concrete economic gains. For instance, the fourth amendment probably imposes enormous additional inefficiencies on the police — the difference we pay (either in the form of paying more or getting less) is the cost of such protections. Ain’t nothing free.
None of this is meant to imply that, on the margin, we could use slightly less law — that is, we might be overproducing but I find it depressing that Scalia thinks that this is a foregone conclusion.
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October 5, 2009, 9:26 amSeth says:
The idea that law attracts more than its ‘fair share’ of brilliant minds is not an original idea. Variants of this social observation have been kicked around for years.
The solution is to make law a major in undergraduate school and avoid forcing people into making a six figure investment into a career that may not tap their potential.
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October 5, 2009, 9:29 amDavid Fernandes says:
A lawyer appearing in the USSC is probably there because of an important Constitutional issue and/or disagreement between Federal Circuits regarding a law, etc. Helping deal with such things is very important. Not to mention, this criticism coming from a judge is a bit rich...
More generally, the reasons we have more lawyers relate to multiple factors including (1) having more and more complex laws means more prosecutors, more defence lawyers, more tax lawyers, etc. (my “favorite” recent example, buying two bottles of cough medicine the same week for children got a grandmother convicted, because the law does not require intent to produce meth and allows no defence); (2) student loan programs encourage getting more degrees even absent desire, to defer payments etc.; and (3) the way society overvalues formal education.
Don’t get me wrong, I want student loans/funding available so that those who genuinely want to pursue further education can (that is, I’m “left” on this issue to some extent), I just don’t like how people seem to “fall into” getting a degree because it gives them 4 years to party, later go to law school because they don’t know what to do and are sold an untrue bill of goods as to how employable the degree will make them, etc. So long as people look down on the tool and diemaker and applaud the unemployed political science graduate in the family, and so long as employers insist on job candidates having degrees for jobs that don’t really need it, we’ll have this problem. There should be funding for all who want to go (and are competent), but it shouldn’t become the de facto requirement to get a good job (as it as become in many instances).
Incidentally, I am a lawyer (with an engineering degree also), but in my experience goodness, intelligence, and even level of knowledge have little to do with how much formal education someone has. One of the smartest people I met never pursued post-secondary education (and I know many other smart people without advanced education who can “hold their own” in social settings with doctors, lawyers, PhDs, etc.), and some of the dumbest people I know graduated from good law schools with good marks.
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October 5, 2009, 9:29 amKenB says:
I am a transactional lawyer. I know my clients regard me as a transaction cost, and I agree. I certainly believe I add value in the sense that my clients are better off with me than without, but in a perfect universe, lawyers would not be necessary.
Luckily for me and others like me, the universe is profoundly imperfect in the sense I am talking about–and will remain so.
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October 5, 2009, 9:32 amShelbyC says:
Dispute resolution has value, however because controlling the dispute resolution process comes with the inherient ability to generate rent, so lawyer’s cost exceeds their value by the rent amount. This is why the private sector is opting out of the legal system to whatever extent possible through binding arbitration, etc.
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October 5, 2009, 9:34 amliberty or death says:
I have this same sentiment. Law is a relatively unproductive enterprise, and there is an inordinate amount of intelligent people in the field. Why this is the case is a very interesting question. I think people often perceive law as an easy path to some level of prestige or money or power. This is unfortunate in a lot of ways.
But actually, there is just an inordinate amount of people who go into law, period.
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October 5, 2009, 9:38 amyankee says:
What basis is there for believing that “so many” of the “best minds” in the country are being drawn to the legal profession? The law schools at Yale, Harvard, and Stanford are dwarfed by the number of science and engineering graduate students at those schools. The comparison is even more stark when you include the other professional schools and the social science and humanities graduate students. MIT alone has almost twice as many graduate students as all three of those law schools combined.
I also wonder about this “put food on the table” standard. Do doctors put food on the table? All they do is allow people to “produce and to go on with their lives efficiently,” which is apparently a non-productive activity. And let us not even begin to speak of artists, movie directors, novelists, comedians, video game designers, marketing experts, Wall Street traders, etc.
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October 5, 2009, 9:40 amShelbyC says:
David Fernandes:
But don’t these go hand and hand? As long as the govt creates a surplus of education, won’t employers use educational success as a way to determine who they should hire?
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October 5, 2009, 9:40 amA public defender says:
I think the fact that Justice Scalia thinks that individuals whose job requires them to protect the liberty of poor people are not doing something productive says a lot about Justice Scalia’s view on liberty.
(And to the extent that any libertarian agrees with him, it would only feed my impression that most so-called libertarians don’t care much for liberty.)
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October 5, 2009, 9:40 amSteve says:
Maybe the brightest minds used to go into law. These days the brightest minds go into finance and earn millions of dollars developing increasingly complex financial instruments. That endeavor has limited benefit to society as a whole, but of course, in a free-market system we know that no one would be highly paid unless they were conferring something of value!
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October 5, 2009, 9:43 amDavid Walser says:
In the great game of life, attorneys and accountants are merely umpires and scorekeepers. Sure, we need someone to call the balls and strikes, to keep track of the number of runs scored, and to designate hits and errors, but umpires and scorekeepers are not playing the game. Umpires and scorekeepers are not even essential to the game. I played a lot of games as a kid with nary an umpire or scorekeeper. That doesn’t mean umpires and scorekeepers do not perform useful and meaningful functions; it just means their roles support the game.
Despite their supporting role, attorneys and accountants often attract compensation one would think would reserved for players. KPMG was paid tens of millions of dollars because their tax accountants could save companies and individuals hundreds of millions. John Edwards made tens of millions of dollars by suing hospitals and doctors. When the umpires and scorekeepers make more money than those playing the game, a lot of those who could play will choose to umpire or to keep score. That may be a perfectly rational decision on their part, but it doesn’t say much good about our system.
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October 5, 2009, 9:44 amgreat unknown says:
Society needs an outlet for the ethically challenged.
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October 5, 2009, 9:44 amShane says:
I’m with Steve on this one. My first thought when reading the quote a few days back was that finance fits the bill far better than the legal profession does. Sure, finance gets capital to where it will theoretically be most efficient, but the sheer amount of volume is an indicator that “investors” are almost always mere speculators.
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October 5, 2009, 9:48 amliberty or death says:
A public defender, in your case, I don’t we have to worry about you being too smart for your job. (That’s just my snarky way of saying you should think this through a little bit more :) ).
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October 5, 2009, 9:50 amyankee says:
Or flags, now that I think about it. Generals and admirals just “enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom,” which is apparently not a productive activity either. Does this mean we have too many smart people in the officer corps?
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October 5, 2009, 9:52 amShelbyC says:
Aren’t investors and speculators two different things, both producing a great amount of value?
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October 5, 2009, 9:52 amyankee says:
And consider marketing. The amount of effort spent trying to get people to buy Pepsi rather than Coke, or Bud rather than Miller, or Dawn rather than Palmolive, is 100% social waste.
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October 5, 2009, 9:56 amDavid Fernandes says:
First, as to the original point, lawyers at their best help society function well — that’s why we have laws, why we have judges and courts, why we have lawyers. Having too many lawyers is a symptom of having too many (or at least too complex) laws, not the cause.
Re:
“ShelbyC says:
David Fernandes:
and so long as employers insist on job candidates having degrees for jobs that don’t really need it, we’ll have this problem. There should be funding for all who want to go (and are competent), but it shouldn’t become the de facto requirement to get a good job (as it as become in many instances).
But don’t these go hand and hand? As long as the govt creates a surplus of education, won’t employers use educational success as a way to determine who they should hire?”
If I recall correctly (could be mistaken, not looking it up again now) there are some legal reasons (privacy, human rights, etc.) why employers can’t e.g. use IQ tests in selecting job candidates (which are flawed anyway, but that’s a separate issue). So instead of testing candidates, the legally permissible “test” of “does this person have a degree” gets substituted.
Also, because law is a regulated monopoly, I am much more concerned about access to legal education and training (that is, if one makes it too difficult to become a lawyer or get a legal education, that makes it the province of a select few and as Dick the Butcher would have it, eliminating lawyers would be the first step to invoking tyranny).
Since the attitudes I refer to seem to be shared by the general populace (e.g. for all the many reasons to dislike then-Gov. Palin, a fairly frequent and in my view invidious one was that she hadn’t gone to an elite college, even by people who weren’t exactly Ivy-league cum laude graduates themselves), I don’t think it is simply a matter of equating employer demands with government funding of education. Even Justice Scalia’s comments are somewhat elitist inasmuch as they express surprise that someone from “Podunk” — i.e., not a biglaw T14 graduate — could actually excel at the profession of law.
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October 5, 2009, 9:57 amGabriel McCall says:
Adam Smith made a huge fuss over distinguishing between productive and unproductive labor. This made sense in a time when the vast majority of economic activity consisted of direct production of physical necessities or first-order capital (i.e. hand tools). Every pair of hands set to clerking in an office or carrying a musket was one fewer pair of hands farming in a field or pumping a bellows.
Since that time, the economy has changed just a little bit, and we can afford and economically benefit from much more in the way of intangible services now that adequate levels of physical production can be sustained by a much smaller fraction of the populace. The distinction between productive and unproductive labor is much blurrier: accountants, for example, would be “unproductive” by Smith’s definitions, but a sizeable company with no accountants would likely be much less productive than they would with them.
Services like accounting, law, and national defense have economic value even if they do not create tangible wealth. It’s no longer adequate to stop one’s economic calculations with the question of whether one is supplied with the physical necessities; two men with an identical inventory of physical possessions are in very different economic situations if one man’s possessions are located in Denver and the other’s are in Somalia. The utility of my possessions is very different in a politico-economic climate where I can trust that those possessions will not be gone the next time I turn around, and that I’m likely to be alive to enjoy them.
Whether overall the law industry saves more wealth than it costs is an empiric question which might make an interesting study, but to dismiss the entire profession as unproductive in the abstract is reflective of a merely superficial grasp of economics.
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October 5, 2009, 9:58 amVisitor Again says:
I think lawyers are of tremendous value in the system we have. They grease the wheels; they enable it to function.
But I do think sometimes that Supreme Court opinions make more work for lawyers. They often complicate things, rather than simplify them. Scalia should put his own house in order.
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October 5, 2009, 10:05 ammadawaskan says:
I’m telling you lately after reading all of the bull excuses for Polanski I have a hell of a lot more respect for prosecutors hell maybe all lawyers if you have to listen to those damn stupid types of excuses all day.
I think I would have to get drunk daily just to sit there and listen to that whining, and sniveling.
Yuck!
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October 5, 2009, 10:05 amJoseph Slater says:
Also, there are different kinds of smarts. People who can become very good lawyers often don’t have the science/math ability to be very good engineers or doctors.
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October 5, 2009, 10:07 amOrin Kerr says:
Scalia says: “Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this society?”
As someone who studied mechanical engineering for five years before going to law school, I am in a position to inform Justice Scalia that the automobile was invented a long time ago, so she would be a little late for that.
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October 5, 2009, 10:09 amHipposGoBeserk says:
KenB: I am a transactional lawyer. I know my clients regard me as a transaction cost, and I agree. I certainly believe I add value in the sense that my clients are better off with me than without, but in a perfect universe, lawyers would not be necessary.Luckily for me and others like me, the universe is profoundly imperfect in the sense I am talking about–and will remain so.
I too am a transactional lawyer. While at times I’m just a transaction cost, I usually add real value. Whether by making my colleagues think through issues they haven’t, being a necessary check on their enthusiasm, or creatively bridging the gap between the parties, I contribute to making the deal get done right. That’s real value for my company.
HGB
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October 5, 2009, 10:10 amDavid Walser says:
No it’s not. One of my hobbies is woodworking and I subscribe to several woodworking magazines. I quit taking one magazine a few years ago because it didn’t have any advertisements. I had found I was spending as much time reading the ads in the other magazines as I was the articles. Similarly, my wife spends more time perusing the advertising fliers in the local newspaper than she does reading the paper itself. Most of those fliers are ads for soft drinks, soaps, toilet paper and other low tech items for which you’d assume we already have enough information to form a buying decision. However, she finds the information about which store really wants our business to be very valuable — just as I find it useful to know Titebond has come out with a new CA glue. Marketing — developing a product, package, delivery channel, that meets customer needs — produces a lot of social value.
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October 5, 2009, 10:10 amTamerlane says:
I was surprised to find that, comparatively speaking, the USA isn’t that bad: International Lawyers Per Capita Comparisons It’s worth remembering that in the good ole Stalinist USSR, service industries were regarded as useless; only farming and heavy industry counted: Once the locomotives and rails were made they were regarded as just a drag on the economy. Ethical lawyers provide necessary and useful services; the unethical, like John Edwards, cause enormous social and economic damage
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October 5, 2009, 10:10 amDale Gribble says:
Following comment #1 from Richard, I remember reading former Harvard Dean Derek Bok make similar comments back in the mid-1980s, also Milton Friedman once remarked on lawyers: “they follow Say’s Law; supply creates its own demand.”
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October 5, 2009, 10:12 amMalvolio says:
There’s an old saying that the only lawyer in a small town will starve but two can make each other rich. The problem is whenever you have a lawyer doing good, prosecuting the guilty, protecting the innocent, &c., you necessarily have a lawyer on the other side.
In an adversarial situation, one side is in the right and the other, in the wrong; in a transactional situation, either the lawyer is steering his client through a maze of unnecessary regulation (created by government or industry lawyers) or helping his client to evade wise regulation. Of course, we cannot know which case we’re in. Like democracy, our legal system maybe the worst possible except for all the others.
If you re-read it, I believe he was just making a remark about the comparatively low level of productivity of being PD in a nowhere town
Yeah, this is called “selective observation”.
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October 5, 2009, 10:12 amEstaLaw says:
Justice Scalia is indeed at his provocative best here, but the idea is not new.
I recall Jonathan Rauch writing an article in part about this problem years ago, called “the Parasite Economy.” I could not find it online, but I vaguely recall that it was written in the early 1990s for National Journal. I apologize if I am mistaken.
In any event, some VC readers might be amused to hear that I was encouraged to read it by one Jonathan Adler, who was attempting to discourage me from becoming yet another lawyer.
I delayed, but did not desist, from becoming a layer. And, of course, Prof. Adler also took the law school plunge, and is now engaged in the business of minting more lawyer-parasites!
Apologies to Jonathan Rauch on both our behalfs!
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October 5, 2009, 10:14 amShelbyC says:
Hell, where I work we invent the wheel about once a month.
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October 5, 2009, 10:14 amCato The Elder says:
Unless, of course, Pepsi does in fact taste better than Coke, Bud does make you sexier in her eyes than Miller, and Dawn does leave less of a streaky shine than Palmolive.
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October 5, 2009, 10:15 amChrisGreen says:
I’m not so sure we have too many lawyers. However, the fact that every company I’ve worked for has to basically import engineers and other technical people from other countries seems to indicate that we don’t have enough engineers and hard science folks.
However, I would have to agree with Steve and Shane that, as an engineer, I would certainly raid the offices of investment banks for manpower before I raided law offices.
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October 5, 2009, 10:18 amCato The Elder says:
I’ve noticed that champion Jewish high school debaters often become lawyers; many would qualify, from the couple I’ve met, as “the best and the brightest”.
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October 5, 2009, 10:20 amCrucis says:
I’ve heard it said that one of the basic problems with our local, state and federal governments is that there are too many lawyers holding elected and appointed positions. Lawyers, who have never had to make a payroll, who have never had to make a loan to tool up for a large order–and the risks inherent of that loan, who have never risked their personal fortunes and that of their family, employees, partners and stock-holders on a decision where they per personally responsible.
I believe there is a very large element of truth in that view.
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October 5, 2009, 10:21 amfrankcross says:
It’s a silly argument. Lawyers provide value, if they did not, they would not be demanded for transactional work, which is the bulk of legal practice. Call them referees if you will, but banks won’t lend money without the protection of those referees, and we’ve seen the consequences of banks being reluctant to lend money
There has been ample empirical study and it has found no negative association between the number of lawyers and economic growth and well being.
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October 5, 2009, 10:23 amthe Bruce says:
A good friend of his family (and an attorney, at that) once congratulated a college friend of mine for choosing to major in engineering, commenting “engineers build things...lawyers just tear them down.”
As a prosecutor, I find it easy to agree with comments to the effect that lawyers create an ordered society, from which innovation and invention derive.
As a former defender of car companies, and author (some years ago) of a note on medical malpractice laws, I find it hard to believe that anyone who has even passing familiarity with tort law can call civil courts a “stable forum for adjudication of disputes” as Oren did. At it’s aspirational best, civil law is normative. As it is now, plaintiffs’ lawyers force corporations (the very entities to whom most modern technological advancements may be credited) to choose between exceedingly high settlement costs and astronomically high potential jury awards, even where the plaintiffs’ claims are unmeritorious. Neither doctors nor manufacturers can be said to be conforming their conduct in a remotely efficient manner as a result of the legal system as it currently operates.
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October 5, 2009, 10:28 amAssistant Village Idiot says:
Orin, I think Justice Scalia knows that, and I think you take his point.
If we take the view that SATV and SATM measure reasonably different skills, however, what would we do with the high verbals in an ideal world to maximise their value to society? (I agree with the idea above that value, not tangible wealth, should be the measure)
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October 5, 2009, 10:29 amShelbyC says:
Well, they clearly provide value in the context of the legal system (i.e. they talk beaucrats into giving property to one party or another, which has value to the extent that we need beaureaucrates to decide who’s property is who’s)
But since we can’t choose the legal system that applies to us, there’s no way to know if the value of the system as a whole is equal to it’s cost.
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October 5, 2009, 10:29 amOren says:
But the question is not whether the cost exceeds the value but if the net utility of lawyers + rent exceeds the situation in the absence of any dispute resolution. You don’t get to itemize the particular utility gains of such a system!
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October 5, 2009, 10:29 amJohn Armstrong says:
Well now that’s just silliness.
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October 5, 2009, 10:31 amthe Bruce says:
The clear front-runner for thread winner!
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October 5, 2009, 10:35 amBryan Gividen says:
Justice Scalia’s argument seems to assume that “brilliancy” in the legal field is fungible to other fields; I don’t know that is a very good assumption. I would go so far as to believe that if any if the Supreme Court Justices had gone into engineering, none of them would have the same relative impact they have in the legal field. I have no doubt they would be successful, but I think they are predisposed to certain abilities and that they maximized their efficiency given their abilities.
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October 5, 2009, 10:38 amMartinned says:
...The Coase theorem in a nutshell...
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October 5, 2009, 10:48 amDiana says:
I think it was the Roman writer Tacitus who observed that if men were always well, society would not need doctors, and if men were always good, it would not need lawyers either. But people do get sick, and they do try to do harm.
There are societies where there are very few lawyers (Merovingian France, communist countries). For the most part they seem not to be places people generally want to live.
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October 5, 2009, 10:55 amMartinned says:
Seconded.
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October 5, 2009, 10:56 amwhit says:
that lawyers are not “productive” in the strictest sense is usually true. they don’t “create value”, they redistribute stuff in a zero sum manner. when you consider transaction costs, it’s actually negative sum.
many companies, innovators, etc. CREATE wealth. lawyers almost always do not create wealth, they redistribute it.
but that’s only on an economic analysis. in the sense of “are lawyers beneficial to the meting out of justice”, the answer obviously is yes. or maybe not so obviously
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October 5, 2009, 10:59 amMartinned says:
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October 5, 2009, 11:00 amJT says:
I used to worry about this. Then I looked around and realized how few people really create value. The majority of Americans are either salesmen or middlemen. Its like the old advice for stimulating the economy. Just bury money and let people dig it up. Doesnt really matter what people do, just give them something to allow them a sense of self worth and a means of support. The Earth (with some technological enhancements) is productive enough that humans can get by with doing very little.
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October 5, 2009, 11:02 amRPT says:
Why do you think that lawyers in private practice don’t have to meet a payroll, or make loans, or risk their assets on cases or transactions where clients may not pay or they may lose? All of the traditional lawyer-bashers have plenty of their own upon whom to call when they deem it necessary.
I’ve heard it said that one of the basic problems with our local, state and federal governments is that there are too many lawyers holding elected and appointed positions.Lawyers, who have never had to make a payroll, who have never had to make a loan to tool up for a large order–and the risks inherent of that loan, who have never risked their personal fortunes and that of their family, employees, partners and stock-holders on a decision where they per personally responsible.
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October 5, 2009, 11:03 ampublic_defender says:
As a proponent of originism, Scalia should find his comment on the value of public defenders ironic. The text of the Constitution mentions only two legal jobs–“Judges. . . Of the supreme and inferior courts” and lawyers who provide ‘the Assistance of Counsel” in criminal cases.
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October 5, 2009, 11:06 amOren says:
Except that many productive enterprises (IP especially) would never be launched without legal protection. The excess value of having enforceable contracts, patents, copyrights and trademarks is not zero-sum.
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October 5, 2009, 11:07 amzippypinhead says:
Justice Scalia is echoing a concern that others have had for years. For example, in 1983 then-Harvard President Derek Bok described the “massive diversion of exceptional talent into [law and similar] pursuits that often add little to the growth of the economy, the pursuit of culture, or the enhancement of the human spirit,” and then explained why this was an obvious mis-allocation of societal resources:
Derek C. Bok, A Flawed System of Law Practice and Training, 33 J. Legal Educ. 570,
573–74 (1983).
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October 5, 2009, 11:07 amMartinned says:
The classic study on this is by Wallis & North (1988). For 1970, the most recent year they studied, they have
- non-transaction industries (i.e. transaction costs incurred as part of industries that are not in their entirety transaction costs): 10,40% of GNP
- trade: 18,25% of GNP
- FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate): 12,15% of GNP
- government: 5,86% of government
- total: 46,66% of GNP.
Studies focusing on other countries than the US have found even larger transaction sectors.
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October 5, 2009, 11:12 amThe Oversimplifier says:
No.
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October 5, 2009, 11:16 amPersonFromPorlock says:
I happened to run across this the other day. The emphasis is Microsoft’s.
Does anyone here doubt that it’s the fear of tort lawyers behind every tree that’s made Microsoft cut itself off from new ideas from outside the company, or that the effect of this move is to stifle innovation?
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October 5, 2009, 11:20 amzippypinhead says:
I don’t think you can honestly view Justice Scalia’s comments as directed at public defenders, or even the appellate specialists and law professors who are the ones generally arguing on behalf of criminal defendants before SCOTUS. At the risk of being accused of being Derek Bok’s sock puppet, however, he did make an observation about many of the idealistic young people who enter law school thinking they’re going to save the world, or the whales, or defendants:
Derek C. Bok, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (Princeton Univ. Press 2005)
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October 5, 2009, 11:22 amOren says:
Considering that Microsoft wouldn’t exist at all without the protection afforded to their intellectual property, this is a small price.
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October 5, 2009, 11:23 amtulanegrad says:
I heard Scalia make a similar comment while talking to students at my law school 15 years ago– he said law is “a facilitative profession that allows the work of the world to be done.” He thought there were too many people getting into it, but at the same time he said “I wouldn’t do anything else.”
He was correct empirically about the purpose of legal work: the function of lawyers is not to produce goods, but to lower transactions costs (at least that’s the idea).
However I find it interesting that Scalia, who has at times said he was fond of the law-and-econ school, would think that there’s something wrong with society because intelligent people choose a field such as law that fulfills them, instead of becoming engineers and “inventing something”- those other fields may not maximize their talents. But it’s long been Republican populist orthodoxy that there’s “too many laws,” “too many lawyers,” and that we’ve hijacked the system to our own benefit and the detriment of society.
Also, I disagree with his factual premise: maybe at the Supreme Court you’re regularly bombarded with excellent advocacy. Down here in the mud, I see a lot of work product that’s less than it should be, with real-world negative consequences for clients.
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October 5, 2009, 11:29 amJT says:
Martinned: Thanks for the pointer. I would suspect the % has become larger since 1970. Back then we had a pretty healthy manufacturing sector. Of course, I live in NY so my perception may be skewed. The people I meet are inevitably in finance, accounting, law, real estate or consulting with a smattering of medical professionals. And yes, the lawyers as a group are the most down on their profession.
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October 5, 2009, 11:31 amcboldt says:
– Does anyone here doubt that it’s the fear of tort lawyers behind every tree that’s made Microsoft cut itself off from new ideas from outside the company –
It’s typical for companies to reject unsolicited ideas, out of aversion to being sued by the people who proffer their unsolicited ideas. If you have an idea that is valuable, companies give you two choices. You can give it up for free, or you can seek legal protection for it, and only after seeking protection, you may disclose it to the company.
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October 5, 2009, 11:33 amMark Buehner says:
Police don’t create wealth either, but obviously they are essential. Then again, there is the question of diminishing or inverse returns. Do we have too many lawyers? Anybody have a number on how many there are in America? If we had (say) 10 times more policemen than we needed, one could make a good argument that we would live in a far different (probably worse) society as those police would need something to do. Probably writing tickets for going 3 mph over the limit, and potentially worse. Laws would likely be written essentially to keep this powerful political block occupied and growing. Are laws written to keep lawyers employed?
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October 5, 2009, 11:36 amJeff R. says:
Society certainly needs a large number of competent lawyers, and ought to be arranged such that the profession is well-paid enough to produce them. Likewise, society needs a large number of competent plumbers, and has made that a quite well-paid trade as well. But barring the imminent arrival of a constitutional convention or the need to re-create a major city’s sewage control infrastructure from scratch, it does not need many, or even necessarily any brilliant lawyers or plumbers.
Especially since, due to the adversarial system, any given brilliant lawyer is going to be using his genius on the wrong side at least half of those times when there is a wrong side for the interests of society and justice.
(Now, if one posits that there are already a large number of brilliant and evil lawyers out there who are almost always on the wrong side for their cases, then there might be an arms-race type argument for more generic brilliant lawyers. [I hope nobody is naive enough to think it possible to purposefully create more good brilliant lawyers who are almost always on the right side...])
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October 5, 2009, 11:48 amMark Buehner says:
That’s assuming there is a ‘wrong side’ and that there is a way to ascertain it without the judicial process in some fair and equitable manner.
I suspect the vast majority of the time that isn’t the case, and the process itself is beneficial to society. In that case the skill of the lawyers involved produces more than the sum of its parts.
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October 5, 2009, 11:52 amnevinscrna says:
It is an unproven assumption that the field of law really does have the ‘best and brightest’ among its ranks.
But even if that is a given, by the very nature of both the institutional selection and self selection they are the best and brightest at lawyering. What is to say they have any aptitude whatsoever at engineering, medicine, or other field? There is really little reason to suppose that society has been deprived of some great revolution because of this. It is a great hubris to think that those in law are so bright and the pool of human intelligence so limited that other fields are left wanting of the mental powers of a supreme court justice.
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October 5, 2009, 11:53 amMartinned says:
The article actually shows their results for every decade from 1870 to 1970. During that time, the transaction sector went from about 25% to about 45%. (Using fixed definitions for the entire period!)
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October 5, 2009, 11:56 amCato The Elder says:
You’re assuming that brilliant lawyers and their clients associate randomly. Perhaps in our society, brilliant lawyers choose only to represent the most upright clients which necessarily forces stupid lawyers to defend only the most despicable. But neither this scenario nor your scenario is necessarily a definite.
I’m not sure how someone would go about measuring such “wrongness” anyway — doubtless the moral quality of each party’s claims are too close to call without first putting a substantial investment in learning the relevant law, in order to be able to judge.
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October 5, 2009, 11:58 amBama 1L says:
Maybe not, but Scalia should have chosen his example better. Scalia is supposed to be a smart guy who takes language and reasoning seriously. He sells books based on that premise. The mythical brilliant public defender from Podunk who argues cases before the Supreme Court doesn’t really advance his argument, does it?
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October 5, 2009, 12:00 pmMartinned says:
I’m not sure. On the one hand, there’s the issue of a kind of arms race emerging, where both sides are forced to spend ever larger sums of money to ultimately reach the same result. On the other hand, getting the lawyers involved is often detrimental to the mutual trust and understanding, etc. That is why there is relational contract theory going back to the 1960s finding that SMEs usually don’t get lawyers involved unless they’ve already given up on all other ways of resolving their conflict. It is also the reason why even lawyers have been working on less adversarial dispute resolution mechanisms, like mediation.
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October 5, 2009, 12:00 pmMike McDougal says:
Gabriel McCall is right. The concept of “value” is almost always used in an arbitrary and incoherent manner.
“Value” is anything people like. It doesn’t matter whether it’s tangible or intangible or whether it’s a product or a service.
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October 5, 2009, 12:03 pmMalvolio says:
There’s always a wrong side. At least one. The accused either deserves the proposed punishment or deserves a lesser (or no) punishment. The plaintiff in a civil case either deserves the requested compensation or does not.
It isn’t clear that the adversarial system should a priori be the best system for obtaining something resembling justice but empirically, it is. I remain open to other suggestions.
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October 5, 2009, 12:04 pmModa says:
What cboldt said. I really can’t fathom how you think tort lawyers are responsible for unsolicited ideas policies, assuming you know what tort lawyers do.
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October 5, 2009, 12:04 pmJT says:
Actually, no. Value is not ‘anything people like,’ and I dont think that is what McCall was saying. Value certainly has an objective component to it. See eg every economic bubble boom and bust in the history of mankind.
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October 5, 2009, 12:12 pmJeff R. says:
Well, assuming the first and pretty much denying the second. But the model behind your statement seems to imply that justice is determined positively by the random chance of which side happens to hire the more skilled lawyer, which seems flatly absurd.
I’m suggesting that when a brilliant lawyer goes up against a merely competent one, the brilliant one is going to win considerably more often when the merits are anywhere near to being close. So half of the time here, brilliance helps and half of the time it hurts.
Now, a weak form of what you’re saying may be that when both sides have brilliant lawyers, the result is much more often the correct one than when both sides have competent ones. But even so, adding more brilliant lawyers is going to cause more damage through the random noise of the first situation than it does better results through the second type. Unless one raises the bar for the bar to the point at which only brilliant lawyers are allowed to practice, which doesn’t strike me as practical.
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October 5, 2009, 12:20 pmMike McDougal says:
Go ahead. Tell me about your theory. I don’t think you will or can, but maybe you’ll surprise me. The issue of whether a measuring number can be assigned to things people like is irrelevant. The issue here is the claim that certain things people like (e.g., legal services) are not valuable but other things people like (e.g., TVs) are valuable.
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October 5, 2009, 12:28 pmBruce Hayden says:
I don’t know where I read it, but it stuck with me. One of the things that happens, on average, when IQ increases, is an ability to deal with more complexity, and the smarter you are, the more complexity that you can deal with (on average).
Lawyers are notably smarter than average, based on IQ. According to the authors of The Bell Curve, the average IQ of people with doctorate degrees, including JDs, but not education doctorates, is about one standard deviation above the mean. The differences between different doctorate degrees (MD, JD, PhD, etc.) were not found to be statistically significant (except, again, that one exception).
The problem is that while lawyers revel in legal intricacies, the legal intricacies baffle and confuse the general public. And, when you have so many legislators being lawyers, the problem gets much worse. They may understand what they did with the laws they passed, but most everyone else does not. So, everyone else needs to hire attorneys to understand and conform to those laws.
So, what you have are lawyers creating the complexity through the legislature (and, yes, to some extent, the court system), and that necessitating the hiring many more lawyers just to deal with the complexity that the first batch of lawyers created.
Let me add that I don’t think that Herrnstein and Murray were wrong about either IQs of people with doctorate degrees, or that higher IQ means, on average, more ability to handle more complexity. I haven’t noticed, for example, MDs or PhDs being any smarter than JDs, on average. Rather, I know brilliant people with each of those degrees, a lot more average (by our standards) people, and then some whom you wonder how they ever got their doctorate degree. And, yes, the different specialties within the professions probably do not have equal distribution of IQs — my guess is that PhDs in theoretical physics are probably smarter, on average, than in, say, Native American Studies (I only picked that because of Ward Churchill).
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October 5, 2009, 12:32 pmMartinned says:
Presumably the idea is that the link from a TV to whatever-it-is-we-ultimately-maximise-let’s-call-it-utility is direct, while the link from legal services to utility runs through whatever legal services obtain for us (eg. a damages award) or stop us losing (eg. the damages award we might otherwise have to pay to someone else).
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October 5, 2009, 12:38 pmBrian G. says:
Obviously, Scalia hasn’t practiced in my state. If he had, he would cite us as an fine example of all of the good minds doing something else besides being lawyers.
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October 5, 2009, 12:44 pmJT says:
Mike, Im not sure I know what you’re asking but Ill give it a shot. You said that value is what people like; and that clearly isnt true. That leaves out the Supply side of the equation (Diamond/Water paradox.) But, of course that isnt the whole story as you have to look at long term value. Classic example is the Dutch tulip boom and bust. Or, maybe you are talking about something like the classic debate within movies. Which is the better film, the summer blockbuster that grosses 50 mil; or the artsy house piece that generates critical acclaim, but cant fill a theatre outside of Paris. I actually have sympathy for both views. As a general matter though, I tend to be partial to the Robert Pirsig view where value=quality.
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October 5, 2009, 12:50 pmB.D. says:
It seems that as an economy matures more people will want to resolve their disputes with the assistance of lawyers. But you can’t ignore the roles Congress and the state legislatures play in creating new ways for the legal profession to take an ever-larger bite out of the nation’s GDP. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most legislators are lawyers.
So much of the current regulatory state reminds me of the parable of the broken window.
And, yes, it is true that many bright people respond to skewed economic incentives and choose a legal career instead of pursuing another path. At least it seems that way from the many unhappy lawyers I have known over the years.
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October 5, 2009, 1:07 pmJT says:
Also, just to let you know where I am coming from. I worked for years at a BigLaw firm. My experience convinced me that a huge percentage (certainly more than half) of the ‘work’ done is driven by billing concerns and not the needs of clients or justice. Work was done purposefully inefficiently and I knew people who were reprimanded for completing assignments too quickly (even though the work was of high quality.) So in that environment I came to believe that legal work is not very valuable.
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October 5, 2009, 1:09 pmShelbyC says:
Value, is, of course “what people like” and it’s measured in terms of what they’ll give up in exchange for it.
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October 5, 2009, 1:10 pmstashy says:
The question is not whether lawyers and lawyering have social value — obviously they do. The question really ought to be framed as whether lawyers add value. For example, a smelter takes ore which, as is, has no value except perhaps as ship’s ballast; the smelter makes it into usable metal. The smelter’s effort adds value to the item she received. Lawyers and lawyering, as a general proposition, conserve, protect or transfer value rather than add to or enhance preexisting value. It is, of course, true that lawyers conserve and protect social values that have no readily computable dollar value — some prosecute crime, provide defense to the accused, contest various constitutional claims, etc. But outside this important non-economic realm, most lawyering is really secondary to and derivative (some might say parasitic) of threshold wealth/value creation and enhancement.
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October 5, 2009, 1:11 pmMalvolio says:
What makes lawyers different from TVs is that TVs do not create the need for other TVs.
OK, that isn’t entirely true. If many people are watching TV, it reducing the cost (because TVs are cheaper) and increases the value (because programming is better funded and being knowledgeable about programming become socially expected) of watching TV.
Those minor effects not withstanding, your worse enemy buying a TV does not make your not buying TV into a reckless act. Legal services create something of an arms race, with all the inefficiency that entails.
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October 5, 2009, 1:18 pmJT says:
Shelby: Does Crack have value? Did Madoff’s services have value? Under your definition the answers would be Yes, and they would be measured as highly valuable.
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October 5, 2009, 1:23 pmShelbyC says:
Crack, of course, has an easily measured value; it is a frequently traded comodity. The Madoff’s services question involves an information disparity, his customers thought they had value but they didn’t know what the services were.
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October 5, 2009, 1:28 pmA.C. says:
I’m a lawyer, and I can’t get my next-door neighbors to quit blowing tobacco smoke out into the hall. So no, lawyers don’t control enough of society yet. When I’ve solved this problem, maybe we will.
More seriously, I do think it’s desirable to structure most ordinary transactions so that most people can do them without assistance. The harder you make it to do everyday economic things, the fewer people will do them. So it’s good that you don’t need a lawyer to buy a car or register for college. The breaking point seems to be at buying a house. Many people don’t see what a lawyer adds there. But most people want a lawyer for anything trickier than that.
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October 5, 2009, 1:40 pmJT says:
Crack of course, has an easily measured price. I would say however that it has negative value.
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October 5, 2009, 1:41 pmRPT says:
“Porlock:
Does anyone here doubt that it’s the fear of tort lawyers behind every tree that’s made Microsoft cut itself off from new ideas from outside the company, or that the effect of this move is to stifle innovation?”
What you cited is a standard Submission Policy intended to preclude meritless copyright infringement or theft of ideas suits by persons who are convinced that a network, studio, et al, has stolen their work because there are general similarities. Companies do not accept unsolicited submission except through known sources such as agents or lawyers. Microsoft gets their ideas from employees (works for hire) or licenses.
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October 5, 2009, 1:44 pmShelbyC says:
Crack dealer, eh? :-).
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October 5, 2009, 1:49 pmloki13 says:
I’m not sure about the “correct” number of lawyers. I do have some specific observations:
1. Litigation is hard, expensive, and emotionally draining. This if often made worse because an individual doesn’t clearly identify what they want when they start, or, more importantly, lose sight of that during the (lengthy) proceedings. As a lawyer, when asked my personal opinion about matters, my advice is always the same– “if at all possible, avoid litigation.”
2. Lawyers are increasingly removed from the day-to-day life of other people. They are used only when there is already a “problem.” In an ideal world, individuals would have a trusted attorney that they could ask questions to. It is cheaper to pay for a consultation than to pay for the resulting litigation.
3. That said, when two parties have irreconcilable positions, litigation is the way we resolve them. Our economy is increasingly complex, and the more transactions there are, the more likely there will be conflict. It is natural that there will be people to resolve that conflict (either ante, for transactional lawyers, or post, for litigators).
4. I m agnostic about the correct number of lawyers, however, I think that there are too many law schools churning out too many lawyers who have difficulty finding jobs right now. There aren’t many “John Edwards” out there– law school tends to select the risk adverse (otherwise, they’d be in business school), and the ranks of superstar plaintiff’s lawyers pulling in multimillion dollar salaries is small. OTOH, I have seen many very bright people go to the T14 and become massively disillusioned with their career choice. Pushed to succeed from an early age, did great in UG, did stellar in LS, got a clerkship, and are now toiling away in doc review at BigLaw partnership with little hope of ever becoming partner, and little of the prestige that they had assumed would come from their exalted role and hard work (outside the lawyering field, no one knows the difference between a Cravath, a Wachtell, and a Dewey Cheatham & Howe– they’re all just ampersands). It’s the old saw– it’s a pie eating contest, with the reward being more pie.
That is all.
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October 5, 2009, 1:52 pmDonald says:
If this were the only thing that changed about the market for legal services, I don’t see how it would solve anything. You’re talking about removing a barrier to entry into the supply side of the market. I guess you’re assuming that lawyers would then compete each other down to a lower market price for their services, because they could profitably do so — AND that the bright minds, now disproportionately drawn to law, would go elsewhere now that the practice was, on average, less remunerative. It’s not clear to me that that would follow, however. Not at all.
Or do you mean that the bright ones could more easily quit law, after finding that they hate it, since their debt load would be lower?
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October 5, 2009, 1:53 pmjn heath says:
If it makes J. Scalia feel better, I dropped law school for lack of money and now productively turn out intelligent circus rigging for a certain Montreal-based entertainment company. Here’s an example. J. Scalia once used “my” work at PP. 27 in _Heller_, without knowing or citing me because the attorneys who briefed that argument used my work for several pages without credit.
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October 5, 2009, 2:36 pmMike McDougal says:
To the buyer, absolutely.
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October 5, 2009, 2:40 pmRuss says:
My, my, my, how the questioning of value has the lawyers in a tizzy...
Lawyers are indispenible to society b/c they’ve made themselves indispensible to society through an ever increasing complexity written into the legal system. The “common folks” have no choice but to use lawyers thanks to laws that no one who is untrained can understand.
America’s rule of law is great, but America’s rule of lawyers is not.
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October 5, 2009, 2:45 pmJT says:
If you knew anyone addicted to crack I suspect that you would disagree with yourself.
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October 5, 2009, 2:47 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
RPT:
Thereby increasing transaction costs and stifling innovation. Those “meritless copyright infringement or theft of ideas suits” don’t happen without the willing aid of lawyers.
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October 5, 2009, 2:51 pmR Gould-Saltman says:
So, Hizzoner will be leaving SCOTUS and directing his efforts during the balance of his life to, let’s see, the dredging out of silted-up harbors? Designing and building a new and better contrabass saxophone? Writing the Great American novel/script/country-and-western song?
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October 5, 2009, 3:03 pmR Gould-Saltman says:
Sez Person from Porlock:
“Those “meritless copyright infringement or theft of ideas suits” don’t happen without the willing aid of lawyers.”. Yeah; but neither do the meritorious ones...
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October 5, 2009, 3:05 pmShelbyC says:
Well, we can certainly argue about whether or not it has value in some sort of religious or moral sense, but it has value in an economic sense, in that people are willing to exchange other items of value for it.
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October 5, 2009, 3:08 pmRPT says:
“R Gould-Saltman: Sez Person from Porlock:“Those “meritless copyright infringement or theft of ideas suits” don’t happen without the willing aid of lawyers.”.Yeah; but neither do the meritorious ones…”
True. Not all such claims are meritless. But there is a necessity to have a filter, and many of the meritless claims are client-driven; sometimes asserted without a lawyer. Almost all such claims lose. My point is only that the submission policy is reasonable and would likely exist even if there were many fewer lawyers.
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October 5, 2009, 3:14 pmMalvolio says:
How would that work (not the disagreeing-with-oneself, but the thinking crack doesn’t have value)? A crack buyer is obviously willing to trade other things that do have value to him for crack. What does that mean if not that crack has value?
Obviously, many crack buyers are crack users and many crack users are crack addicts. I don’t know much about the economics of addictions, but I would guess if you became addicted to a substance, the value of that substance would go up for you, rather than down.
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October 5, 2009, 3:14 pmJT says:
It goes back to the original topic of the post — whether lawyers are a productive (valuable) part of society. Many lawyers certainly get paid like they are productive. But that just begs the question. Just because something has a price that people are willing to pay does not mean that good or service is valuable as such. Crack is the easy example. It is more than an issue of being valueless in a religious/moral sense. Almost all crack addicts would love to kick their addictions. Yet, they cant and will exchange items of value to obtain the drug. They hate the drug. They do not value it. But, they will do almost anything to get just one more hit. Therefore, crack has a price but not a value even for the people who pay for it.
I believe that dichotomy goes to the heart of Scalia’s comment. He is saying that the price of lawyers is greater than their value. This is simply a market distortion. And I think he is right.
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October 5, 2009, 3:22 pmRandy says:
People we have too many of:
Lawyers, investment bankers, consultants, tv and movie stars, advertising and marketing people, talking heads, sports fans, traffic engineers and others who think building more roads and more sprawl is the solution to everything.
People we have too few of:
General practitioners (medical), teachers, care givers for the elderly, the infirm, and those in need, gardeners (both pro and amateur), audiences for classical music, really hot guys, people who preserve history and historical buildings, bicyclists, people with good taste, innovators of all kinds, law abiding citizens, and fabulous people whatever their profession.
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October 5, 2009, 3:33 pmOren says:
I’m not to fond of Lutefisk, but I wouldn’t say that it has negative value to those that clearly assign it significant exchange value.
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October 5, 2009, 3:35 pmOren says:
These two statements cannot be true at the same time.
A crack addict’s problems come from valuing crack too much, not because they don’t value it at all.
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October 5, 2009, 3:37 pmloki13 says:
They do not value it. But, they will do almost anything to get just one more hit. Therefore, crack has a price but not a value even for the people who pay for it.
I believe that dichotomy goes to the heart of Scalia’s comment. He is saying that the price of lawyers is greater than their value.
I’ve heard variations of this argument many times. First, the issue with crack is this– as you are addicted, your demand curve becomes increasingly inelastic (you are price insensitve). But that doesn’t speak to the “value”.
But what do you mean by “value”. I could say that teachers are more valuable professional baseball players, but MLB players get paid more. I could say that diamonds are less valuable than copper, because copper has more industrial uses, yet diamonds cost more.
Value is simply what others are willing to pay for something. You can assert that they pay too much or too little, but there is no other measure. Unless, of course, we elect Der Kommissar of Value who tells us what everything is truly worth. Don’t think that works very well.
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October 5, 2009, 3:38 pmJT says:
Malvolio: Again, I am making a distinction between price and value. Havent you ever paid for something you didnt want or value?
And Im glad you caught the ‘disagree with yourself’ phrase. I use it b/c it makes me smile :)
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October 5, 2009, 3:38 pmShelbyC says:
I see your point now, although the same logic applies to, say, dialysis machines or wheelchairs.
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October 5, 2009, 3:40 pmJT says:
Loki13: Ah, thank you. I was waiting for someone to call me on that. Of course the reductio ad absurdum of my argument is to elect as you say ‘Der Kommisar of value’ which would of course be terrible. But that is not the direction I would go in. In my mind those who are arguing the case that price=value even in such an extreme example as crack are demonstrating the reductio ad absurdum of the supply/demand case. Yes, in a perfect world supply/demand produces a perfect price in which price reflects value. But, of course we do not live in a world of perfect information/rationality etc. And the price of crack proves it! So, what to do? Just like in every other real world solution — strike a balance. Use supply/demand, but when there are obvious market distortions use common sense to assign value differently and try to make price correlate closer to value.
As for your MLB/teachers and diamond/copper examples I would just note that we spend more on education than we do on athletes, we just have to employ many more teachers than athletes to meet our needs in those areas. I would also suspect that the world market for copper is more important than that for diamonds, though I know very little about economics in metalurgy so I am hesitant to comment about it.
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October 5, 2009, 3:56 pmJT says:
Well I guess the difference is that dialysis and wheelchairs objectively improve the quality of life for people who unfortunately need them. Crack objectively destroys the QOL of users. People who hate their wheelchairs do so only because they hate their disability. With crack, the product is the disability.
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October 5, 2009, 4:03 pmloki13 says:
JT–
Two points– we might spend more on education than we do for professional baseball (as a whole), but this is a reflection of supply/demand. There is more money overall for education, but also more people who can teach. In addition, if we thought, as a society, that teaching was “more valuable” we should pay more money for education. Some might even argue that baseball players are underpaid and that too much surplus goes to owners who get a free pass on the monopoly....
I also disagree with you on crack. You might argue that it is valueless, but that clearly not the case. Not everyone starts as an addict– there are new entrants into the consumer market all the time! And they aren’t getting addicted from their first hit... in fact, the price is both high (in some ways) and low (considering the inelastic demand for addicts... but also to allow for new entrants to the demand-side). And the market seems to settle on it.
Again, we can label something valueless (like crack, or prostitution, or marijuana, or heroin) in the sense that have a feeling about, say, it’s moral value or the social impact it has. But otherwise, we’re left with the market (us– buyers and sellers) to determine what the “value” is.
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October 5, 2009, 4:07 pmOren says:
No, that makes no sense.
I have paid for things that I mistakenly believed would be of utility but were not. I have paid for things because I misjudged how much I wanted them.
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October 5, 2009, 4:21 pmPerseus says:
I’d like to see the study that purports to show no negative association between the number of lawyers and “well being.” (/snark)
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October 5, 2009, 4:23 pmJT says:
loki: I think we agree on the education/baseball issue. Yes, it is supply/demand. And Im totally fine with that. My point is that we value education highly, we just get a good deal pricewise because the supply is relatively high. (Similar to water — thank heaven we have enough of that stuff to go around, at least for now...) Also, we distort the market for teacher salaries by mandating education and providing it for free up to a certain point. Maybe we should pay more for education, but we dont have to, so we dont. And that is a good thing. On the other hand, we give teachers tremendous respect for what they do. When was the last time you heard someone thank an i-banker. So, that is also worth something even if not in monetary terms. Same with our military people.
As for the first time crack user; the first hit is not a rational decision based on value but is a result of faulty information, a false sense of invincibility, peer pressure, profound stress, or other psychological illness.
My basic point is that value does not equal price. I value my ability to get water free from the tap more than most things I pay for. I value the job done by generals in the armed forces higher than that done by energy traders at Citi. I value the work done by SC Justices more than I do the work done by Wachtell partners. I value the scientists who recently won the Noble Prize for their work on chromosomes more than those who developed Propecia for Merck.
I really dont think that any of those statements are controversial. And Im not saying that our system of rewarding people based on supply/demand is anything other than the way the world works (taking into acct market distortions, which I believe to be more widespread than usually acknowleged.) My point is that value does not always equal price, and we can acknowledge the obvious without compromising our basic faith in markets.
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October 5, 2009, 4:42 pmJT says:
Oren: You never contributed to a charitable cause because of peer pressure? Never bought girl scout cookies to keep on good terms with neighbors? Never bought a present for a loved one that you believed to be silly, but knew they would like? Never paid for something so that someone would stop annoying you about it? Never paid for something because it was the ‘in’ thing and all the cool kids had it? Never paid taxes?
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October 5, 2009, 4:46 pmShelbyC says:
Aren’t all of those just different aspects of value?
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October 5, 2009, 4:54 pmChrisTS says:
Randy:
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October 5, 2009, 4:54 pmloki13 says:
Have you ever bought a car that you might not have because of the saleman? Have you ever purchased a piece of art not because you like it, but because you thought it would you appear more “cultured”? And so on.... the value to a person is the price they will pay for it, otherwise, they wouldn’t pay. Anything else is a normative judgment (which is fine!) but of no... um... value. I think diamonds aren’t worth what people pay for them? Then *I* don’t buy them. *I* think that their value to *me* isn’t worth the price. But otherwise, unless Der Kommissar comes in, on aggregate all we’re left with is price=value.
(And your taxes example doesn’t work. I’ll let you think about that.)
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October 5, 2009, 4:56 pmJT says:
Yes, but in each case the value is not related to the product at issue (other than arguably the cookies and the in product,) and they all cause market distortions.
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October 5, 2009, 5:01 pmChrisTS says:
I agree with JT that the price=value claim is too narrow, certainly if we are speaking of individual valuations.
For example, I pay what my attorneys charge because I have no say in their pricing system. Same for food, medicines, and many other ‘goods.’ My valuation of my purchases is not always [maybe, seldom] accurately measured by what I am ‘willing’ to pay.
If price=individual valuation, then — in a twist on the free market idea — each of us should pay just what s/he thinks something is worth. As it is, I am being forced to pay more for things I do not value accordingly, and I am not paying what I would pay for things I value more highly.
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October 5, 2009, 5:04 pmShelbyC says:
Of course you have a say, you just don’t realize it. If you didn’t, they’d charge you infinity.
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October 5, 2009, 5:15 pmChrisTS says:
:-) In that event, I would not have attorneys.
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October 5, 2009, 5:16 pmVisitor Again says:
You think crack has no value? I’ve had occasion to see many of the seemier sides of life, including people smoking crack, both the addicted and more occasional users. I have seen them on hands and knees examining the carpet or the concrete or the tarmac, looking for minute pieces of crack they may have dropped as they smoked. They pick up almost anything to examine it. Rarely do they ever find any particle of crack. It is pathetic. And yet it is as if they are looking for flecks of gold.
Some people degrade themselves in order to get crack. Thus the so-called “strawberries,” who prostitute themselves for a hit. Some commit crimes, thefts and robberies, to get funds for crack. They obviously place a value on crack.
Shortly after crack made its first appearance, someone in a rehab center told me that if you had $1,000 in your pocket and tried crack for the first time at, say, 7 p.m., spending, say, $40 for it, by the next day, you would have nothing left because the high is so overwhelmingly seductive, you would go back to the dealer again and again, trying to recreate that first high.
Some women are addicted to buying clothes. Because they have an addiction, does that mean the clothes they buy have no value? Of course not. And the same is true of crack–and any drug, including alcohol and tobacco. They give pleasure, even if that pleasure is merely relief from the symptoms of withdrawal for the addict, and that pleasure constitutes value.
By the way, I have never done crack or any form of cocaine–and never will. I’ve seen what it does to people, even people with good lives who thought they would just give it a try one time only.
One of my friends wondered just this morning what would happen to the economy if all drug dealers went on strike for a month. She had been to a pharmacy to fill a prescription in South Los Angeles, and saw a huge amount of drug peddling going on out in the open outside the pharmacy. It was like a marketplace with all the bartering going on. And it is not just in South Los Angeles that this occurs; it is rampant everywhere. The war on drugs is a farce.
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October 5, 2009, 5:18 pmMalvolio says:
Certainly, I’ve paid parking tickets; I’ve paid my taxes; I have never paid an extortionist or a kidnapper, but other people have.
The pending question: do lawyers as a class resemble extortionists (unjustly harming others, thereby creating “demand” for their services in undoing or mitigating the harm) or do they resemble physicians (who work to reduce harm caused by natural processes or third parties)?
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October 5, 2009, 5:18 pmloki13 says:
ChrisTS–
And some people don’t have attorneys at the price you’re paying for them. Disliking the price of something and still paying for it is regret, not a great argument for free floating “value”.
Supply and demand curves– aggregate. There are those who would pay more, and those who won’t pay at that price.
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October 5, 2009, 5:19 pmbpbatista says:
Lawyers, in general, are a drag on society. They do not produce wealth. They merely redistribute it — in a very inefficient manner. And they take a healthy cut for the privilege.
I’m with Shakespeare — kill all the lawyers.
Present company excluded, of course. ;-)
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October 5, 2009, 5:38 pmChrisTS says:
loki13:
I thought some were slipping between individual valuation and market valuation too easily; hence my post.
However, I would note that thinking that market cost = value is too narrow a conception of value does not entail a theory of free floating “value”. It does not even entail excluding reference to market value from one’s theory of value.
Let me offer an example (or, a puzzle). A ‘genuine’ Van Gogh will bring a huge price on the art market. An absolutely perfect — down to ageing, brushstroke, pant media, etc. — copy of a Van Gogh painted by someone else will bring nothing. (Ok, prison, maybe.)
But we do not value the ‘real’ Van Gogh because it brings a high price. We value it because of its provenance. And that is why folks with money to burn will pay high prices for the real deal.
In other words, even when markets seem to be reflecting people’s valuations accurately, the market value is grounded in some prior valuation. At best, market value illuminates or points to underlying valuations. (At worst, it reflects rigged markets, monopolies, etc.)
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October 5, 2009, 5:56 pmShelbyC says:
Exactly.
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October 5, 2009, 6:12 pmloki13 says:
ChrisTS,
To confound your example, there was a recent piece by Errol Morris on aa great art forger (of Rembrandt). Something which is both highly valued (an highly priced) will collapse in both price and “value” when it is found to be a forgery (unless the forgery becomes notorious....). But it is the same object.
This is beside the point. The price of an item might be “too high” or “too low” due to various factors including market imperfection. But to say that there is a “true price” or “underlying value” of an item is to put the cart before the horse– the true value of something is what someone is willing to pay for it. If, for example, DeBeers stopped advertising, and people no longer kept diamonds as family heirlooms (bigger secondary market) and substituted other precious stones for engagement rings (as they used to before advertising), then the price would go down. I could say that the price of diamonds (outside some limited industrial uses) is way “too high” compared to their value.
Saying that, and bringing two months salary, can buy an engagement ring. :)
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October 5, 2009, 6:16 pmShelbyC says:
The buyer values the Von Gogh because of it’s provenance, more than the $$. The seller values the $$ (or more accurately, what he can buy with the $$) more than the Van Gogh’s provenance. This discrepancy is what makes the economy possible.
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October 5, 2009, 6:18 pmShelbyC says:
Put another way, the “value” of something only has significance when I wish to exchange it for something else. And in that context, it is “worth” however much of that something else I can get.
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October 5, 2009, 6:22 pmChrisTS says:
loki13:
Yes! But it was Vermeer, wasn’t it? I loved Morris’ take on it as a perfect scam precisely because the forger did not try to perfectly emulate Vermeer.
I got started thinking about art objects years back when thinking, perhaps oddly, about the value of natural objects. You know: ‘a perfect replica of a tree that is not a tree’ sort of thing. I think those objects whose value is closely tied to ‘provenance’ – genesis – offer a particularly good counterexample to the ‘it’s all what the market will bear’ view.
I do not believe there is a ‘single, true’ value to anything. We can identify some basic goods that will always be valuable — of value — to humans (food, water, shelter, etc.). Other ‘things’ and experiences will be more or less valued by cultures and individuals. But, I do think that what people will pay is only a marker for what people value in a market economy. The price=value view* is a kind of value-theory version of misplaced concreteness.
Still, I think you are correct (haha) in thinking that diamonds are overvalued. They are valued, to the extent they still are,** as luxury items/symbols of love and as useful for various technical purposes. The latter is likely to be a more lasting — less purely market-driven — value, because it is grounded in use that is grounded in need.
*I do not presume to imply that your position is so reductivist.
**My son thinks the diamond jewelry adds should be edited to show a severed arm hanging from every ring.
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October 5, 2009, 6:38 pmA. Zarkov says:
One hears that the New York City diamond merchants conduct their business without lawyers and contracts. If this is true (I don’t know for sure that it is) then at least in this small economy lawyers are completely unnecessary. I doubt if this system would scale to anything much larger because it’s dependent on the local Jewish culture. Most, if not all the merchants in the diamond business (centered around 47th Street) are observant Jews, predominantly Orthodox and Hasidic. They trust one another because of their shared values, and they will ostracize the miscreants– a punishment far worse than a lawsuit because it means the transgressor is out of business.
As the US becomes more and more multicultural, we become less and less trusting and more and more in need of lawyers. Multiculturalism is destroying America.
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October 5, 2009, 6:53 pmloki13 says:
ChrisTS–
Yes, it was Vermeer. *doh* Bad memory, and that. I would never be so bold as to say that there isn’t some inherent value to things, or that people could not (or should not) make normative judgments about the value of things relative to the price. However– I think ShelbyC is exactly right, the only way that we can know what something is “worth” (as opposed to a subjective idea of what it should be worth) is to measure the price when it is exchanged by a willing buyer and seller. Think of a classic example– A, B, C and a widget.
A owns a widget. A is willing to accept any offers greater than $7. B soesn’t want the widget, but knows that C wants it badly. C is willing to pay up to $23 for the widget.
A sells widget to B for $10.
The next day, B sells widget to C for $20.
What is the “value” of the widget?
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October 5, 2009, 6:56 pmloki13 says:
Wow.... and to think I was enjoying your post before that (lawyers to diamonds, full circle).
What does “multicultural” mean to you? We shouldn’t allowed jewish people in? We shouldn’t have allowed in the Irish and the people from the Southern Mediterranen? No? Not what you meant?
hmmmm.... I think the Native Americans would agree with you. Been going downhill ever since Columbus. All we brought them was smallpox and John Edwards.
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October 5, 2009, 7:04 pmChrisTS says:
Ah. I think ‘exchange’ offers a thought experiment of sorts: what would you give/give up for X? That is, I think such a thought experiment can be helpful in determining valuations. BUT, to equivocate between ‘exchange value’ and ‘monetary value’ is to simply fall into a particular kind of economic paradigm.
For example: Suppose someone offers to trade her Vermeer for my Turner, but I love Turner much more than Vermeer – or, perhaps, I love my particular Turner more than I love her Vermeer . I might love my Turner more than her Vermeer because I a) love American artists more than Dutch ones; b) I love sea scenes [and mine is one]; or c) my Turner came to from my family, and I value it as a part of my family heritage.
I will not trade.
However, it happens that Vermeer is much bigger in the art market, and I learn that her Vermeer will bring in three times the price of my Turner if I were to try to sell either. The money looms large. I love my Turner; it is more valuable to me than any Vermeer. My spouse is yapping at me about the MONEY. My youngest child wonders if there will be any funds left for his college education . I cave. I make the trade and sell the Vermeer, even though I would not have sold the Turner. But, I do not think this Vermeer is more valuable to me than my Turner .
Looked at externally, it appears I ‘value’ the Vermeer more than the Turner. But this is, at the least, a misrepresentation of my valuations.
I suspect that many ‘market transactions’ are also misrepresentations of persons’ actual valuations. And that is just another reason that ‘price’ is not a simple equivalent for ‘value.’
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October 5, 2009, 7:05 pmloki13 says:
ChrisTS–
Actually, in your example:
Going price for your Turner: X
At X you will not sell.
Price offered for your Turner: 3X
(you’re not keeping the Vermeer, you’re selling it, right!).
Ergo, the value of the Turner to you was *exactly* 3X, because that’s what you were willing to part with it for.
(And no fair blaming the missus and the kids– you’re a rational actor ;) )
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October 5, 2009, 7:12 pmA. Zarkov says:
I’m using “multicultural” in the same sense as Robert Putnam in his study
In the Abstact he writes
However after reading his report I see that his “in the long run” is more a hope than a fact. Putnam was extremely uncomfortable with his own result and declined to publish it for a long time. But I think we have to face facts about multiculturalism. I bring this up because the diamond merchants are an extreme form of mono-cultrualism as well as an example of a group with an extraordinarily high level of trust.
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October 5, 2009, 7:35 pmRicardo says:
Multiculturalism is what allowed that Jewish community to exist in New York as a distinct group whose members trusted each other in the first place, Zarkov.
Small inter-related communities are also not always cooperative. Harlan County, Kentucky and the surrounding rural counties were extremely isolated and populated by only a handful of families in the 19th century but had shockingly high murder rates as a result of the bloody family feuds that would inevitably break out. Orthodox Jews can settle business disputes by having the community ostracize the offending party. Immigrants from the British Isles who settled in Kentucky settled business and other personal disputes by a duel or by murdering the offending party in cold blood.
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October 5, 2009, 7:55 pmA. Zarkov says:
That’s true, but how does that prove that multicultural in general is always desirable? Not every group is going to operate the same way as your Kentucky example shows. Obviously all groups are not equivalent in all ways. Some will benefit the host country more than others.
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October 5, 2009, 8:13 pmRicardo says:
It doesn’t. But one would think that after making the statement “multiculturalism is destroying America” the burden of proof would be on the person making such a strong statement to back it up. Instead, the one example you cited was actually a counterexample: an ethnic minority that supplies diamonds to consumers at a cost not artificially inflated by legal fees sounds like a net positive for America and one made possible by multiculturalism.
But I would just as soon not get side-tracked into a debate on multiculturalism when the original topic was about the social utility of lawyers. Some people here seem to always try to steer conversations back to their hobby horses like immigration, multiculturalism, Islamic extremism, the Obama administration, hate speech restrictions, and the like.
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October 5, 2009, 8:47 pmA. Zarkov says:
I should have said “... destroying America as we know it.” I say that as a resident of California who is witnessing its conversion into “Mexifornia” without any obvious benefits.
I brought up the diamond merchant example to show we don’t always need lawyers to do business. It’s then natural to ask: “Where else might such a system work? I think the answer to that is wherever there is a high level of trust. That in turn leads into the ideas of social capital as put forth by Putnam. It’s Putnam’s research (not mine) that demonstrates multiculturalism reduces trust in a community. In other words, there is linkage between the need for lawyers and multiculturalism.
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October 5, 2009, 9:05 pmJT says:
Wow, a lot of discussion since last I looked. Anyway, the whole point of markets is to efficiently and fairly allocate goods. To say that goods are priced fairly because that is the market price is to flip the equation. You need to ask why is that the market price. If the answer is something severely societally disruptive then a change should be made. (And no, you dont need a Kommisar; I just mean this to address obvious market distortions.) For instance, why is medical care so expensive? That is the question most in the news now and something our society is trying to address. Or, why are banking execs so expensive? Another question we are asking. (And the ‘we need to be able to attract and retain the best talent’ argument is the biggest steaming piece of BS that people currently get away with.) On the question of diamonds, I am actually ok with the high price. As a baseline it is a kind of marital insurance. Women agrees that if she gives her heart and body to man she will in turn get something portable of value to compensate if he leaves. Basically, it is a tangible symbol of commitment. Although the blood diamond issue is a problem.
As for the crack issue Visitor Again proved my point when he said ‘By the way, I have never done crack or any form of cocaine–and never will. I’ve seen what it does to people, even people with good lives who thought they would just give it a try one time only.’
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October 5, 2009, 9:39 pmShelbyC says:
Well, that’s your opinion, formed based on your level of information and incentives. But the folks who actually have skin in the game, and for whom the stakes matter, take a different view. Sure there are agency issues, but the principals aren’t flocking to banks with lower-payed execs.
It sounds like you think that markets should set market price unless you think the market price is a steaming pile of BS. That’s just not a good way to align decision-making with incentives.
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October 5, 2009, 10:18 pmJT says:
No, I think that markets should set market prices. I also think that market distortions should be fixed. Why do I think bank execs are so highly compensated? Well, people generally get perks with their jobs that correlate with the industry they work in. For example, those in sports and entertainment get free tix, people who work for airlines get free flights, doctors get free health care, dell engineers get free tech stuff etc. Finance people work with money. For all our discussions, bankers are the people in our society who most set prices. So, they price their own services very highly. That is my perspective. If you have a different one formed from your level of information and incentives I would love to hear it.
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October 5, 2009, 10:58 pmRicardo says:
You need to be clear on which bank execs you are concerned with. I suspect it is with executives at the top investment banks like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley rather than with your local community savings bank. Investment bankers do a lot of their business through established relationships with CEOs (for M&A or underwriting activity), government officials (for bond placements), or the heads of leading pension funds, endowments or sovereign wealth funds (for institutional brokerage). The reality is that often these institutions do business with a specific individual rather than a specific firm. If a banker is unhappy with his bonus, he can always threaten to leave and take his clients with him to another firm. This can and does happen in the financial world.
Bonuses for traders are another story entirely. I would also like to see these based on long-term performance.
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October 6, 2009, 12:41 amMartinned says:
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October 6, 2009, 4:43 amBrett Bellmore says:
In some instances the former, in some the latter. But the opportunities to act in the latter role are limited, and so any expansion of lawyering beyond a certain point is in the former category.
And we passed that point a LONG time ago.
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October 6, 2009, 4:46 amHavoc Jack says:
Funny. It seems to me that the significant feature of this arrangement isn’t trust, it’s the social stigma. To borrow a physics term, a society based only on trust is in unstable equilibrium (think of a pencil balanced on it’s end); sure it’s stable now, but a shock to the system brings everything down. If they only relied on trust, then sooner or later they’d trust someone who didn’t deserve it, who’d screw them over in a big way as soon as it was worth his while. And then what happens? They don’t trust anyone anymore and in come the lawyers they were doing so peacefully without.
But if you bring in the punishment, then it becomes a much worse idea to screw over the group; you’re trading long term value (a profitable relationship with the diamond industry) for a relatively small short term gain. People don’t, and the system works. It’s much safer to trust someone when it’s in their best interest to fulfill that trust. (Note that this leaves out the possibility of someone stealing enough to spend the rest of their days somewhere with warm sunny beaches. I’d argue that the Orthodox Jewish concepts of time and family (it’s not just about you, but about your children, and grandchildren and so on) tend to limit this sort of calculation).
Re the original post, whether or not a lawyer’s abilities are easily translatable to engineering is beside the point. To excel in lawyerdom, you need to be able to quickly dissect an argument, evaluate it, and reply intelligently. These same skills would serve well in the worlds of business, philosophy, diplomacy or (dare I say it?) politics. The question isn’t what to do with unemployed lawyers.
The question also isn’t whether some lawyers are beneficial; I think it’s obvious that we need lawyers. Every case needs a lawyer to argue for it and against it, and I certainly hope the judge has opened a law book somewhere along the line. Similarly pretty much any other branch of the law.
The question is whether we’re wasting our brilliant minds arguing the law when they could be out doing something brilliant. Note that his specific example is inventing the automobile. The public defender representing a shoplifter is doing something noble and useful, just as the engineering intern who’s adjusting his AutoCAD file so that the part now has a 17 degree slope is. But neither is revolutionizing society with the next generation’s tech leap; that brilliant public defender could be out there talking Iran out of it’s nuclear material.
Now, assuming there is for the moment an oversupply of brilliance in the legal profession (we need brilliant lawyers too, but perhaps not so many), we’ve got two options. The stifled legal clerk could quit his job to study philosophy like he’s always wanted to, eventually formulating the idea that defines the next century, or we can alter society such that there is less need for lawyers, thus reducing the total number of lawyers by economic pressure, and proportionally reducing the number of brilliant lawyers to the level we actually need. (Get back to me when either happens.)
All that has been retreading arguments already spoken. I still haven’t said anything to answer the question. I’d like to suggest a correlation between the number of lawyers a society needs and the number of laws it has; it takes a lawyer to understand a law. I think I understand what the second amendment means. So does my buddy over there. Trouble is, we understand different things about it. Suppose we get to arguing, how do we settle the argument? If it’s serious, we call a lawyer or several. As far as laws go, the second amendment is pretty easy to read. What if I’m dealing with something complicated like the tax code, or environmental regulations? If the market demand for lawyers is proportionally related to the number of laws, and if the number of laws keeps growing (it does), then the market demand for lawyers keeps growing such that either we get more expensive lawyers, more lawyers, or more lawyers who are also more expensive. As the population of lawyers proportionally rises, the number of brilliant people in the profession rises, and the number of brilliant people going into law gets larger and larger in relation to those entering the rest of society.
Actually defining the difference between not enough brilliant lawyers and too many is a riddle which I’m not able to solve.
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October 6, 2009, 6:04 amScalia – “Too bad the brightest are going into law.” « Inquire Esquire's Blog says:
[...] brilliant, you know. Why isn’t she out inventing the automobile or, you know, doing something productive for this [...]
ShelbyC says:
I don’t. Your perspective is, of course, perfectly valid. My point was that presumably neither you nor I have the level of information neccessary to accurately price banker’s services, nor do we have the incentives necessary to aquire that information. We are constantly seeing folks with limited information claiming that they can see market distortions (i.e. the price of gas can’t possibly be this high, there must be some kind of manipulation), and we can’t let those opinions trump the opinions of the actual stakeholders.
Of course, if you really feel that market distortions cause bank exec’s services to be significantly overvalued, you are perfectly free to form JT’s bank, with limits on executive compensation. That is the mechanism by which these distortions get corrected.
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October 6, 2009, 7:21 amThe Practice of Law - In The Agora says:
[...] Hat tip to The Volokh Conspiracy. [...]
A. Zarkov says:
It’s both. Let’s say trust is a necessary but not sufficient condition for such a system to operate. The diamond merchant Jews also have a creed– an ethical system that dictates behavior.
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October 6, 2009, 11:25 amJerryT says:
Clearly the best comment in the entire thread. :)
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October 6, 2009, 11:44 amloki13 says:
It’s interesting– I asked Zarkov what he meant when he said multiculturalism was destroying America. Clearly, not the Orthodox Jews, as that was his example. So.... who?
Given A. Zarkov’s previous posts about race and crime, it would seem that “multiculturaism is destroying America” translates to “blacks and hispanics are destroying America.”
He is of course, entitled to his opinions. And Zarkov is always polite. So in addition to pointing out the obvious from his words, I would like to add the following constructive comment:
The conception of what is “white” in America has undergone substantial revisions. For example, in the past people who complained about immigration (the multiculturalism that destroys America) belived that “white” meant northern European, protestant immigrants. They didn’t want those Catholics, Jews, and swarthy southern europeans in, not to mention the Irish! Of course, with time, this attitude changed, and white became more encompassing. Italians? Yo! Jews? Mazel tov! Catholics? We had ourselves a president with some chowdah. Each of these groups were bent on destroying America with their “inferior” ways, and somehow we muddled through it.
I think we’ll be fine.
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October 6, 2009, 12:57 pmChrisTS says:
Well, I guess I’m the missus. My claim was that I would not sell it for 3X or anything more. (Which is true, in fact, and very difficult to explain to the hubby and kid.)
I guess a simple way to make my general point is this: market value reflects something about how people value various objects and services at a given time. It does not do so perfectly, precisely because there are hidden aspects of valuation, vagaries of human reasoning, and distortions in the market.
Vagaries in human reasoning might explain being willing to trade for the Vermeer and then sell it while being unwilling to sell the Turner for the same price. Hidden aspects of valuation could include other valuations, such as getting the jerks off my case. :-)
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October 6, 2009, 3:15 pmChrisTS says:
loki:
I realized I should expand my narrative.
Someone offers to trade her Vermeer for my Turner. My spouse says, “Jeesh; a Vermeer? And it’s worth three times as much!” I say, “I don’t care about the money; I love my inherited Turner.” Still, I am persuaded to trade; after all, it is a Vermeer (and hubby loves Vermeer).
Months later, the spouse and kid say, “We need money. Why not sell the Vermeer?” After some accusations that they have tricked me, I say, “Whatever; we could use the money.” I part with the Vermeer because I do not love it. But I would never have sold my (my grandmother’s!) Turner for that amount of money in the same circumstances.
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October 6, 2009, 3:25 pmJT says:
I agree, want to be my first client :). I would also love to have more detailed knowledge. The information I do have though comes from representing the banks for 4 years. I did get some chance to look under the hood, and see how the business operates. But, it was not the involvement of a true insider.
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October 6, 2009, 7:28 pmIgnorantia Juris - Held In Low Esteem says:
[...] ABA Journal (via the Volokh Conspiracy) comes a worrisome quote from Justice Scalia: I mean there’d be a … public defender from [...]
Blawg Review #233 | Popehat says:
[...] States Supreme Court questions whether lawyers, of which the United States has no shortage, provide more social utility than scientists, engineers, and inventors. We would respond, as might Emperor Norton, that a nation which has a superabundance of laws [...]