Should We Kill All the Lawyers?
Lawyers are often an easy target for would be comedians. Countless jokes center on ambulance chasing and shifty filers of frivolous lawsuits. Hostility to lawyers is not just a recent phenomenon: in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, written in the late sixteenth century, Dick the Butcher recommends, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Is Shakespeare’s Dick the Butcher right? Most legal work is actually not about ambulance chasing, criminal law, and frivolous lawsuits. Instead, it involves the writing and enforcement of contracts, which is how property rights are established. Property rights are essential to protect investments. A good system of laws, by itself, does not provide incentives to invest, because property rights without enforcement are meaningless. This is where lawyers come in. When someone encroaches on your land or makes use of your property without your permission, a lawyer can stop him or her. Without lawyers, you would be unwilling to invest. With zero or limited investment, there would be little economic growth. The United States has more lawyers per capita than any other country in the world. It is also among the richest countries in the world with a financial system that is superb at getting capital to new productive uses such as the technology sector. Is this just a coincidence? Or could the U.S. legal system actually be beneficial to its economy? Recent research suggests the American legal system, which is based on the Anglo Saxon legal system, is an advantage of the U.S. economy.*