Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution, co-author the the recent book First, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers, argues in a New York Times op-ed that consumers would be far better served if the market for legal services were opened up to competition. Instead of relying on the extremely weak reed of bar discipline to protect against lazy or dishonest attorneys, he suggests that the free market would be much more effective. Costs would fall, both for legal training and consumer services. The impact on existing law schools would be severe, but there is no reason to prop them up by maintaining an inefficient status quo.