Trouble at the Bar

Clifford Winston, the Searle Freedom Trust Senior Fellow in the Brookings Institution's Economic Studies program, has been with Brookings since 1984. He is an applied microeconomist who specializes in the analysis of industrial organization, regulation, and transportation.Winston has also been co-editor of the annual microeconomics edition of Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Prior to his fellowship at Brookings, he was an Associate Professor in the Transportation Systems Division of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Civil Engineering. He has published numerous books and articles, including, most recently, Autonomous Vehicles: The Road to Economic Growth?, with Quentin Karpilow (Brookings 2020) and First Thing We Do, Let's Deregulate All the Lawyers, with Robert Crandall and Vikram Maheshri (Brookings, 2011).David Burk is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Economics at Georgetown University. Jia Yan is Professor of Economics at Washington State University.

• Contents:Acknowledgments1. Introduction2. Returns to Law School Before and After the Great Recession3. A Brief Assessment of the Market for a Legal Education4. Law Firms5. Self-Selection of Government Lawyers and the Earnings Penalty6. Resource Constraints for Lawyers in Government7. Justice Ideology and Supreme Court Decisions8. A Synthesis9. Policy Reforms to Improve the Legal Profession and Benefit the NationReferencesNotesIndex

Trouble at the Bar is an extraordinary book. It surveys and analyzes—with great conceptual and empirical sophistication—the organization of the entire U.S. legal system and the legal professionals who staff it, from the dreams of students choosing to attend lower-rated law schools to lawyers working in the office of the Solicitor General to the lawyers on the Supreme Court itself. Every person in America should understand at some level the operation of the legal profession. Trouble at the Bar provides the basis for that understanding."- George L. Priest, Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics, Yale Law School;"Trouble at the Bar takes an empirically based hard look at the state of the legal profession in the United States. It examines the barriers in place for regulating entry through law schools and restrictions placed on purveyors of legal services. It makes a compelling case for deregulating many aspects of the profession and opening it up to fresh approaches. It is a serious book about a serious problem and warrants a close read."- Jame J. Heckman, Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics, University of Chicago; research fellow, American Bar Foundation