Why the Nation Needs More Lawyers
![handle is hein.journals/thurlr22 and id is 25 raw text is: WHY THE NATION NEEDS MORE LAWYERS
BY JAMES OTTAVIO CASTAGNERA*
The U.S, is loaded with lawyers. That was the lead in a Business
Week article earlier in this decade. I As proof the magazine presented
seemingly compelling statistics. In 1992 the U.S. was cursed with 307.4
lawyers per 100,000 persons, while Japan was blessed with only 12.1
attorneys per 100,000 population. Britain and Germany claimed 102.7
and 82 lawyers in the same per capita ratio.2 Since Germany and Japan
rank among America's most successful and dangerous rivals, the clear
implication was that something must be very wrong with this picture.
The article, aimed primarily at touting alternative dispute resolution
techniques as superior to litigation, went on to chronicle business
persons' concerns with their legal fees and litigation exposure. This
concern was characterized as stimulating nothing less than a revolution.
The legal revolt among corporations is only one facet in an
unprecedented rethinking of the U.S. Justice system.3
But, like calls for the American labor movement to abandon its
confrontational ways and embrace employee participation programs,4
the corporate and Congressional cant for less lawyers and litigation
in emulation of a Nipponese model ignores in the first instance vast
cultural gulfs. These gulfs make the Pacific Ocean seem but a stream
separating the two societies. Despite the samurai image, revived in the
militarism that helped precipitate World War II, the Japanese tradition
of societal cohesion, homogeneity and aesthetic sensitivity has been
traced still more deeply into that nation's history. 5 By contrast Europe
* Associate Provost, Rider University, J.D., Case Western Reserve Law School,
Ph.D.,Case Western Reserve University.
1. Jane Birnbaum, Guilty! Too Many Lawyers and Too Much Litigation. Here's a
Better Way, Business Week, Apr. 13, 1992, at 60.
2. Id. at 61.
3. Id. at 60.
4. James 0. Castagnera, To Confront or Cooperate? The Lesson of Anthracite Coal,
41 Lab. Law J. 158 (1990); Owen E. Herrnstadt, Why Some Unions Hesitate to Participate
in Labor-Management Cooperation Programs, 8 Lab. Law J. 71 (1992).
5. See, e.g., Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand
Years 33 (Scribner, 1995)(The beauty and sensibility cultivated in [1lh century Japanese]
poems... was the object of every form of public display. Only in an archery contest do
[Japanese nobility of the period] approach the practical world of values of their European
counterparts and contemporaries; their usual competitions are in painting, dancing, and mixing
perfumes and incense.)](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/thurlr22&div=7&collection=journals&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Why the Nation Needs More Lawyers
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