CULTURE WATCH : Help! Our Lawyers Are Multiplying

Speaking of frightening thoughts: If current trends continue, Harvard Law School Dean Robert C. Clark predicts, by the year 2023, “there will be more lawyers than people.”

Since 1960, he reports, the number of lawyers in this country has increased at a rate more than five times faster than the growth rate of the general population. Although the recession has curbed demand for legal services, Clark continues, in 1991, for the fifth consecutive year, enrollment at ABA-approved law schools increased.

Clark attributes this trend to three “cancerous growth” theories: moral decline in society, lawyer-generated demand and an imperfect market for legal services.

He also presents four “benign growth” explanations: greater internationalization, greater population diversity, changes in wealth levels and greater involvement of the work force in formal organizations.

“No doubt there is much about the legal profession that ought to be changed,” Clark concedes--presumably beginning with the profession’s extraordinary population explosion. But in a defense of lawyerdom, he argues that “the profession appears to be a useful one, for the whole modern world is demanding its services.”