On humility

A lawyer friend told me recently that I needed a "little humility" after a characteristically self righteous Reeves post discussing my driving interactions with the law.  I agree heartily.  While I am incredibly humble about my cha cha and golfing skills, I can be a pompous ass when it comes to my strongly held philosophical, political and religious beliefs.  My standard prayer includes a whole section on humility.

But I got to thinking:  aside from pompous 'lil me, I don't think that the driving community as a whole has gotten appreciably less humble over the years.  So a devilish thought crept into my head:  how is our legal community set for humility these days? (And let me add that my lawyer friend is a prince of a guy and if all lawyers were like him the law would be very humble indeed).  I had always wanted to take a look at how the economics of the law had evolved in the postwar period and this gave me the perfect excuse to do so.  So I ran a few numbers.  Which to say the least are very 'humbling':

Total US Spending on Legal Services 1963:      3.877 Billion
Total US Spending on Legal Services 2007:  198.351 Billion
(In Current, Inflation Adjusted Dollars)
Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis

So, real spending on legal services has grown 5115 percent since 1963 in a period where our population has grown roughly 75 percent.  Wow.  So the logical next question becomes: Well, what has all this new spending on lawyering wrought?  I mean what have we gotten for all these shiny new JDs?  I don't know for sure and would be happy to run a brief online survey if challenged but I suspect if I asked 100 randomly selected Americans if the "Value" of legal services that they've received has risen fifty-fold since '63 I'd get no takers.  Five-fold?  Three-fold?  Twice? - now at that point I think I'd get some takers.  But I'd bet that most Americans would say that the quality of justice in America hasn't got any better since '63.  Another way to put this is that if Walmart had delivered the same results as our legal caste, a packet of underwear that cost 4 of today's dollars in 1963 would go for between 100  and 204 dollars today.

That's a lot of legal humility.  Humble lawyers driving humble Chevys from their modest apartments to their crowded Dickensian offices. So how did all this humility pile up?

It's inconceivable:  impossible really, to understand how an education system controlled by lawyers leading to admission to a guild gatekept by lawyers could result in lawyers controlling the political parties and selecting the candidates - mostly lawyers who then ratify laws drafted by lawyers who then choose lawyer judges who judge the laws the lawyers have passed ably assisted by law enforcement lawyers and defended by other lawyers only to appeal to appellate courts totally staffed by lawyers.

Given a system as open, competitive and transparent as that, how could this possibly have happened?

Now the perceptive will point out and I readily agree that to blame lawyers solely for the expansion of the cost of law is unfair.  It's like blaming car makers for car wrecks.  But automakers are expected to improve their product's efficiency, comfort, performance and safety every year.  And by and large they have.  It is the minimum we expect from our elites: in exchange for the wealth and power they receive they are to take what they are given leave it better.  But evidently, not the law.

It's as if oilmen got to decide who could enter the oil business and wrote and passed our energy laws and appointed oil men to set the environmental and safety regulations for oil production and when oil companies got in trouble, it was oil men that served as judge, prosecutor and defender and when the oil defender appealed the case to the oil appeal courts other oil men did the judging.  Does anyone doubt that in a closed system like that a gallon of gasoline would go for $250?

Wow this is a toughie.  I'd better bill in 15 minute increments.  But humbly.