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Today is September 1st, 2011, and my guest is Cliff Winston, Senior Fellow at the Brookings

Institution. His latest book, Co-Arthur with Robert Crandall and Vic from Maheshry, is,

first thing we do, let's deregulate all the lawyers. Cliff, welcome back to Econ Talk.

Thanks, good to be here again.

Now, the title of the book is a takeoff on Shakespeare Henry VI, part two. First thing we do,

let's kill all the lawyers. You have a much more modest proposal, which is to deregulate all

the lawyers. And essentially, in the book, you make the shocking claim, I think shocking to many,

that America has too few lawyers. Why is that?

Well, again, I want to be a little careful here. I'm not sure whether it has too few or too many.

There has been a debate about that. I think our position is, whatever the number, we have too few of them competing

as intensely as they could be, and probably too many that are getting paid very, very high wages.

And that with competition, we would, those kinds of premiums fall. Now, in the end, whether we're going to have more or less,

it's not really so much the focus of the book, as much as the competitive changes that we'd like to see.

But at this point, I probably speculate that we may have more, but that's something we can get into a bit later.

So, what's the evidence? Why do you make the claim that there's an adequate competition? What's holding it back?

Well, let's first start with the institutional setting, and there are interesting things here that are different from other markets that appear to have these features.

The key part about lawyers that we call occupational licensing, that is presumably for reasons of information quality that people can't really tell in advance

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