Society needs more lawyers, seriously
What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? — A good start.
Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California all the lawyers? — New Jersey got to pick first.
You’ve probably heard a million lawyer jokes. And there’s an argument — my colleague Ben Barton has made it at book length — that lawyers and judges (who, of course, are lawyers themselves) make law unnecessarily complicated, enriching the legal profession at everyone’s expense.
But while lawyer-bashing is fun for many people, the fact is in a legalistic society such as ours, what we really need is more lawyers on the side of the good guys. Happily, there are a few out there.
One group that I’ve admired for years is the Institute For Justice, a free-market public-interest law firm that works to protect people, mostly poor people, from the heavy hand of the state.
The Institute for Justice has fought hard against civil forfeiture, which lets cops take your stuff without proving you committed a crime and then keep it for their own benefit. This “policing for profit” is deeply corrupting to law enforcement, and it’s also fundamentally unfair. If the government wants to take your stuff, they should have to prove you’re guilty of something. Even then, the police shouldn’t get to keep the money. It should go into the general treasury so that they’re not tempted to choose their targets based on what they’d like to seize.
The institute has fought this in court and has pushed legislation to limit such misbehavior at both state and federal levels.
According to the institute’s John Kramer, “Since 2014, IJ has been instrumental in persuading six states to now require criminal convictions to forfeit property. And of those six, two have completely abolished civil forfeiture.”
One thing holding poor people back, as even Barack Obama’s White House has noted, is the spread of intrusive occupational licensing laws. It’s hard to get ahead when you have to invest time and money making the state happy — 300 hours of training to shampoo hair.
The folks at the institute have brought suit on behalf of florists, casket-making monks, cab and van drivers, independent tax preparers, African hair braiders and more. And they’ve also pushed legislative change. According to Kramer, “In just the past two years, IJ has persuaded nine states to do away with their licensing laws for hair braiders. This year alone, five states eliminated licensing for braiders — Delaware, Iowa, Kentucky, Nebraska and West Virginia.”
Economists and (a few) politicians have talked about the problem of excessive occupational licensing regulations for years, but the Institute for Justice is one of the few places to do anything about it. And they’re able to be effective because, well, they’re lawyers.
But they’d better stop soon. Otherwise, they might give the legal profession a good name. And nobody wants that.