The Flaws of the Law

As hackles go, mine are about as easily raised as anyone I know and, as such, I probably shouldn't even live in a place like Korea because this, as Korea's official unofficial nickname says, is "the land where logic goes to die."

The local newspapers and policy augers have had their knickers in a twist for the past few days over the Korean government's decision to allow a select few universities to open new law schools in Korea. And twisted the knickers should be.

But first, a bit of background...

At present, Korea only admits 1,000 new lawyers to the bar annually, regardless of how many students are capable of taking or passing the bar exam. One thousand, that's it. The result of this, as you might have guessed, is that Korea has a pitiful dearth of lawyers - 10,000, at last count, compared to one million in the United States - and, as often happens in fields with limited competition, those lawyers are not what you'd call "world class." Additionally, Korea has what by many accounts is the least-open legal market in Asia, in which foreign law firms are not legally allowed to open offices here.

What we're thus left with, when we walk this quota system out to its logical consequence, is a legal market that promotes collusion amongst attorneys, with predictable results: Korean companies are not satisfied with the locally-available legal advice; lower and middle class consumers cannot afford legal advice; and motivated, capable students who wish to become lawyers are kept out of the field by quotas pushed by the legal lobby and backed by the government.

Fancying itself the swashbuckling hero, the Roh¹ administration last week put forth the kind of "solution" we've come to expect from a group of nincompoops that clearly slept through Economics 101. Their Grand Resolution - and I don't think I could've made this up - is to raise from 1,000 to 2,000 the quota of annual bar entrants. To do this, the government spent countless hours and liberal sums of taxpayer money to decide which universities should be allowed to open new law schools and how many students they should be allowed to admit each year (see table²).

The Korean government, as governments are wont to do, presumes that it knows better than the university administrators the capabilities of each school. What no one has yet explained, however, is why any university - particularly a private institution - should not be allowed to open a law school provided it can attract the resources, staff and students to make it a competitive venture.

Even more galling has been the public response to this proposal. I have yet to see anyone of public note suggest that quotas of any kind in this area ought to be abolished. The debate ranges merely from the universities whose law school ambitions were snubbed to those who think quotas are fine, but that the present numbers are too low.

"We demand that the government raise the total number of students at law schools to at least 3,600 so that 3,000 new lawyers will enter the market per year," wrote Lee Ki-Su, chairman of, not surprisingly, an association of law professors in a recent editorial.

I understand why Korean lawyers, like any labor group or special interest, would oppose any further liberalization of their personal market, but I've been stunned at how readily the Korean public has stepped up to support quota systems in the legal and law school markets. The rationalizations are myriad:

• The government must direct our nation's human resources, otherwise people will waste their time in occupations for which they're ill-suited. (An argument not even worth dignifying with a counterargument)
  
• Certain universities are not capable of operating quality law schools.
• Without quotas, Korea will have too many lawyers.

Of course, an open and free market would naturally take care of any school - and the graduates thereof - that offered low-quality legal education, as it does for schools that provide lousy education in any other area. Even if law graduates from these lower-tier schools could pass the bar exam, they'd face difficulties finding employment and would certainly command lower wages than those from schools with education of a higher quality. This, it bears noting, would all happen absent any government intervention.

I have no particular affection for lawyers as a species, which is why I'd like to see more of them. If that sounds paradoxical, consider that expanding the number of practicing attorneys would force them to compete with one another and make them, if not likable, at least better at what they do and thus of more use and of lower cost to the rest of us.

And if Korea does somehow find itself with "too many" lawyers, it can always turn to a solution that's worked well in the United States: open hunting season.



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Notes
¹ Another head-scratcher of the current system of legal education is that a person need not graduate from an accredited law school in order to sit the bar exam (thankfully, this will supposedly change under the new system). Korea's president, Roh Moo-Hyun, is himself only a high school graduate, but he managed to eat his way through the test prep books and pass the bar exam.

² Table from Joong-Ang Daily. 31 January, 2008