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The license to be a Barber or a Hair Dresser is a cartel, but you would never say the same thing about requiring doctors and civil engineers being licensed. Be

The license to be a Barber or a Hair Dresser is a cartel, but you would never say the same thing about requiring doctors and civil engineers being licensed. Being represented by an under-qualified attorney can ruin your life. You can go to jail because your attorney was incompetent. When the consequences are that high, we need the Bar.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Barbers have price transparency. Lawyers and doctors have open-ended fee schedules.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  There's no reason a Barber couldn't charge based on time spent cutting your hair. There's also no reason a lawyer cannot charge a fixed fee, which is more standard for document drafting. You might not want to pay a lawyer a fixed fee for a case though, as that would incentivize them to put in as little work as possible. And none of this has anything to do with the licensing, which artificially restricts the supply of Barbers and Lawyers, letting them charge more regardless of the billing scheme.
AnthonyMouse 7y ago
> Being represented by an under-qualified attorney can ruin your life. You can go to jail because your attorney was incompetent. When the consequences are that high, we need the Bar. The same concern cuts both ways though. It's just as problematic to have rules that raise the cost of legal services beyond what some people can afford, because not being able to afford an attorney can lead to all the same dire consequences.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  Because we have laws requiring a lawyer be provided in a criminal case and we have high standards for lawyers, you theoretically will get a good lawyer even if you cannot afford one. Of course the public legal system is incredibly under-funded so in reality this doesn't work out. Let's consider this from a different lens though. "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea. There is a minimum amount of knowledge and experience a person needs to be qualified to build a bridge. If you cannot afford to pay someone who meets the requirements, you have no business building a bridge. The issue is funding, not the requirements.
  - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
    > Because we have laws requiring a lawyer be provided in a criminal case and we have high standards for lawyers, you theoretically will get a good lawyer even if you cannot afford one. Of course the public legal system is incredibly under-funded so in reality this doesn't work out. "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is." > "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea. A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services. > The issue is funding, not the requirements. Not necessarily. Standards can be inefficiently high. It's not worth spending A to avoid a 1% chance of losing B when 100A is more than B.
    - henryfjordan 7y ago
      > A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services. That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period. The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before. See: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_population_15_higher_than_10_years_ago_new_aba_data_shows http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_population_15_... But those lawyers aren't working as public defenders because it's probably the worst job to take once you've invested in a law degree in terms of pay and stress. And until the funding situation changes to make that job more desirable, people will continue to suffer no matter how many lawyers there are.
      - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
        > That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period. That's fair, but then you're also talking about a foundational change to the legal system. Just providing a real public defender to criminal defendants would dramatically reduce the number who take a plea, and then you're not just funding public defenders, you now need more prosecutors and police officers and judges because there are so many more cases where the defendant would have their day in court. That would explode the budget so much that the proposal would be politically impossible without some significant changes to the laws (e.g. end the war on drugs and do something more meaningful than we ever have before about poverty) to dramatically reduce the number of criminal defendants to begin with. Which is what we need -- but that's hardly just a matter of funding. It requires a huge political change. And it gets even worse for civil cases, because then you're going to want to fund the plaintiffs as well, otherwise you're back to the little guy being unrepresented. But then you're creating an incentive for plaintiffs to file thousands of frivolous lawsuits at taxpayer expense to try to find one that sticks, because who benefits is no longer aligned with who pays. Spending money reduces barriers which multiplies the amount of money you would have to spend. The only way to reduce the cost is to actually reduce the cost, i.e. reduce the number of man-hours it takes for a given legal process, not just change who is paying for it. > The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before. The claim isn't that the standards are preventing people from becoming attorneys, it's that they're raising costs on clients. If you over-regulate nuclear power, the problem isn't that then nobody wants to be a construction worker and build nuclear plants, it's that it makes nuclear cost more than fossil fuels like coal. And that, even when it does get used, it still costs more than it should because you're imposing rules whose cost exceeds their value.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

Barbers have price transparency. Lawyers and doctors have open-ended fee schedules.

henryfjordan 7y ago
There's no reason a Barber couldn't charge based on time spent cutting your hair. There's also no reason a lawyer cannot charge a fixed fee, which is more standard for document drafting. You might not want to pay a lawyer a fixed fee for a case though, as that would incentivize them to put in as little work as possible. And none of this has anything to do with the licensing, which artificially restricts the supply of Barbers and Lawyers, letting them charge more regardless of the billing scheme.

AnthonyMouse 7y ago

> Being represented by an under-qualified attorney can ruin your life. You can go to jail because your attorney was incompetent. When the consequences are that high, we need the Bar. The same concern cuts both ways though. It's just as problematic to have rules that raise the cost of legal services beyond what some people can afford, because not being able to afford an attorney can lead to all the same dire consequences.

henryfjordan 7y ago
Because we have laws requiring a lawyer be provided in a criminal case and we have high standards for lawyers, you theoretically will get a good lawyer even if you cannot afford one. Of course the public legal system is incredibly under-funded so in reality this doesn't work out. Let's consider this from a different lens though. "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea. There is a minimum amount of knowledge and experience a person needs to be qualified to build a bridge. If you cannot afford to pay someone who meets the requirements, you have no business building a bridge. The issue is funding, not the requirements.
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago
  > Because we have laws requiring a lawyer be provided in a criminal case and we have high standards for lawyers, you theoretically will get a good lawyer even if you cannot afford one. Of course the public legal system is incredibly under-funded so in reality this doesn't work out. "In theory there is no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is." > "Bridge Engineers are too expensive so lets make the requirements to become one more lax" is obviously a dangerous idea. A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services. > The issue is funding, not the requirements. Not necessarily. Standards can be inefficiently high. It's not worth spending A to avoid a 1% chance of losing B when 100A is more than B.
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    > A lot less dangerous than the alternative of not hiring a Bridge Engineer at all and still having to build the bridge, which is the analogous situation for legal services. That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period. The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before. See: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_population_15_higher_than_10_years_ago_new_aba_data_shows http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/lawyer_population_15_... But those lawyers aren't working as public defenders because it's probably the worst job to take once you've invested in a law degree in terms of pay and stress. And until the funding situation changes to make that job more desirable, people will continue to suffer no matter how many lawyers there are.
    - AnthonyMouse 7y ago
      > That is the absurdity here though, that people are being forced to build a bridge with no support. With more funding, we could provide an engineer for every bridge (and a lawyer for every case). Nobody should be forced to go through the legal system without an lawyer. Period. That's fair, but then you're also talking about a foundational change to the legal system. Just providing a real public defender to criminal defendants would dramatically reduce the number who take a plea, and then you're not just funding public defenders, you now need more prosecutors and police officers and judges because there are so many more cases where the defendant would have their day in court. That would explode the budget so much that the proposal would be politically impossible without some significant changes to the laws (e.g. end the war on drugs and do something more meaningful than we ever have before about poverty) to dramatically reduce the number of criminal defendants to begin with. Which is what we need -- but that's hardly just a matter of funding. It requires a huge political change. And it gets even worse for civil cases, because then you're going to want to fund the plaintiffs as well, otherwise you're back to the little guy being unrepresented. But then you're creating an incentive for plaintiffs to file thousands of frivolous lawsuits at taxpayer expense to try to find one that sticks, because who benefits is no longer aligned with who pays. Spending money reduces barriers which multiplies the amount of money you would have to spend. The only way to reduce the cost is to actually reduce the cost, i.e. reduce the number of man-hours it takes for a given legal process, not just change who is paying for it. > The number of lawyers has been growing in recent years. It's hard to claim standards are too high when more people are becoming lawyers than ever before. The claim isn't that the standards are preventing people from becoming attorneys, it's that they're raising costs on clients. If you over-regulate nuclear power, the problem isn't that then nobody wants to be a construction worker and build nuclear plants, it's that it makes nuclear cost more than fossil fuels like coal. And that, even when it does get used, it still costs more than it should because you're imposing rules whose cost exceeds their value.