The Market for Lawyers

IT is hardly news, but the plethora of bad jokes about lawyers should be the tip-off that the 1980s were a boom market for legal services. Data always lag behind a little, and mine are no exception: the current recession is not included. But although the price of lawyers' time in the mid1980s had not attained the all-time heights of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was traveling fast in that direction. The harder problem is understanding why. The data are described in light of some fundamental economic ideas. Much important research on the economics of occupational choice has been done by economists who were at or associated with the University of Chicago. Milton Friedman's doctoral dissertation, published with Simon Kuznets,l was a remarkable, pioneering empirical study of incomes from independent professional practice, contrasting medicine with law. Some important aspects of that study were clarified and extended by H. Gregg Lewis.2 David Blank and George Stigler's study of scientists and engineers was one of the first empirical studies of a subject that is still a great concern of public policy.3 T. W. Schultz and Gary Becker devel-