One commenter asks whether lawyers really need to go to law school at all. Prior to the ABA’s big push in the 1920s for “higher standards,” most lawyers had not gone to law school, and many of the law schools then in existence had programs lasting less than three years. Using the typical smokescreen of concern for consumers, the legal profession went about lobbying for the requirement that prospective lawyers must get a degree from an ABA-accredited law school before being allowed to take the bar exam. There were some incompetent lawyers back then, and there still are. It isn’t formal legal schooling that makes for a competent practitioner. I covered all of that and the legal profession’s main cartel trick of prosecuting anyone who does anything resembling legal work, no matter how competently, for “unauthorized practice of law” in a Cato Policy Analysis, “The Case for a Free Market in Legal Services.”