Your general point is well taken, but do you think the fact that there is notable unemployment among law grads demonstrates that the ABA requirement (in most st

Your general point is well taken, but do you think the fact that there is notable unemployment among law grads demonstrates that the ABA requirement (in most states) that people complete a very expensive three year degree is not an example of regulatory capture? Or that the existence of a non trivial number of law grads proves that the requirement does not affect the availability and price of legal services? As you can probably tell, I do think the ABA does still function effectively as a cartel. In fact, the seemingly paradoxical co-existence of brutally indebted and underemployed law grads and the lack of available and affordable legal services may in fact be a consequence of cartel-like behavior in the legal industry. If very smart people were allowed to self-study and take the bar, they might be able to offer lower cost legal services, free of the severe debt that accompanies a 3 year JD at UC Irvine, for example. Honestly, I'm not even sure the quality of lawyers would go down if we eliminated the requirement. Why? Because really smart people who can learn rapidly may be turned off by a program that forces them to go through 3 years at 50k a year, when there are other fields that allow them to learn at a more rapid pace. If the bar exam remained rigorous, allowing smart people to learn at their own pace might actually draw more talented people in, yet in a way that would allow them to keep prices lower. It might also be possible to require some apprenticeship and coursework, but less onerous and with less debt. Keep in mind, regulatory capture can involve expanding reasonable requirements for licensure into unreasonable and onerous ones. Arguing that regulatory capture exists does not commit you to arguing agains any regulation. I want to be clear this is just a thesis - I'm intrigued by the possibility, and as you can tell, it think there's a good chance it's true, but no, I'm not totally convinced, and it's hard to test - to really know, it would have to happen at scale, with enough time to ramp up, something that could take a generation or more.