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33 Ariz. St. L.J. 429 (2001)
Why Do We Regulate Lawyers: An Economic Analysis of the Justifications for Entry and Conduct Regulation

handle is hein.journals/arzjl33 and id is 445 raw text is: WHY Do WE REGULATE LAWYERS?: An Economic Analysis of the Justifications for Entry and Conduct Regulation Benjamin Hoorn Barton* In the middle of the nineteenth century the legal market was virtually unregulated. Several states passed statutes allowing any registered voter to practice law, and the nominal requirements for bar entry in other states were not enforced.' There was also no explicit regulation of attorney behavior.2 Visiting Clinical Professor of Law, Arizona State University College of Law. B.A. 1991, Haverford College; J.D. 1996, University of Michigan. The author gives special thanks to Indya Kate Kincannon, the Honorable Diana Gribbon Motz, Deborah Hamilton, Marc Reiner, James Krier, Robert Dauber, George Schatzki, Larry Winer, Cathy O'Grady, Chuck Dallyn, Jonathan Rose, Fernando Tes6n, and the participants in a faculty seminar at the Arizona State University College of Law. 1. New Hampshire, Maine, Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan expressly abolished any requirements for appearing in those states' courts. See HENRY S. DRINKER, LEGAL ETHICS 19 & n.38 (1953). Likewise, those states that maintained a bar admission requirement significantly slackened their standards. See ROSCOE POUND, THE LAWYER FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERN TIMES 227-28 (1953): In 1800 a definite period of preparation for admission to the bar was prescribed in fourteen of the nineteen states or organized territories which then made up the Union. In 1840 it was required in but eleven out of thirty jurisdictions. In 1860 it had come to be required in only nine of the then thirty-nine jurisdictions. 2. See HENRY WYNANS JESSUP, THE PROFESSIONAL IDEALS OF THE LAWYER: A STUDY OF LEGAL ETHICS xxiv (1925) (noting that prior to organized statements of ethics the traditions of the profession were perpetuated and the fundamental principles observed as a result of the habit of the tribe); Richard L. Abel, United States: The Contradictions of Professionalism, in LAWYERS IN SOCIETY 186, 219 (Richard L. Abel & Philip S. C. Lewis eds., 1988) (Until well into the twentieth century, professional discipline in most jurisdictions depended almost entirely on those informal pressures for conformity that inhere in the face-to-face contacts within small local bars.); Fannie Memory Farmer, Legal Practice and Ethics in North Carolina 1820-1860, in THE LEGAL PROFESSION, MAJOR HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS 274, 350 (Kermit L. Hall ed., 1987) (noting that prior to 1868, no court, so far as the records show, was called upon to disbar an attorney in North Carolina); Bruce Frohnen, The Bases of Professional Responsibility: Pluralism and Community in Early America, 63 GEO. WASH. L. REv. 931, 931-38 (1995) (arguing that early American lawyers learned professional responsibility from other lawyers, as well as from the society at large); William R. Johnson, Education and Professional Life Styles: Law and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century, 14 HIST. EDUC. Q. 185, 187-92 (1974). In Wisconsin in the nineteenth century Iglroup standards were defined and enforced in an immediate and personal manner. Id. at 192.

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