The Free Market Approach, Summed Up

From openmarket.org, I bring you a recommended piece on how taking the free market approach to law school reform can improve the present situation. Included are comments on some questionable comments on deregulation in general, some excellent comments on law school price competition and practicality, and some arguments about standardizing court procedures:

To stimulate the economy, and make it cheaper to obtain justice, Congress should require the abolition of local federal court rules that differ from one trial court to another, and one appeals court to another, making a uniform set of rules for each for civil trial and appeal by supplementing the existing Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and Appellate Procedure. It should also consider conditioning federal funding to states (some of which ends up funding state judiciaries or participants in the state court system like prosecutors, police departments, and state child-support agencies) on their adopting simpler court rules for their own state courts. For example, it could require each state to adopt procedural rules in civil cases that are uniform across each state, and are organized to correspond where possible with the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

Good luck with that one. No one way in hell are the reigning baby boomer niche lawyers going to make it easier for people to compete across county and state lines.

As I've pointed out previously, there are solutions where law becomes more regulated, and I think the results could be similar. But it's clear that there are a lot of things that could be done to fix a variety of problems that aren't being seriously considered.

And that brings me to another point. It seems that in the wake of LawProf beginning his blog, a lot of law professors have started talking more seriously about legal reform. This actually concerns me for two reasons: first, I worry that innovative voices (such as the author of the piece I linked to) may be effectively shut out of the debate by the entrenched parties, beliefs, and interests, which, let's face it, law professors represent; second, and I mean no offense towards law professors, these issues are too important to be left to academics.