Once in place a social custom is hard to change. Let us hope the emerging societies can implement the protective aspects of law while avoiding its historic wasted social efforts. Law is considered complex, mysterious, and incomprehensible. In tribal times, there were the medicine men. In the Middle Ages, there were priests.
Today there are the lawyers.
For every age, a group of bright boys, learned in their trade and jealous of their learning, who blend technical competence with plain and fancy hocus-pocus to make themselves masters of their fellow men. We cannot buy a home or rent an apartment, we cannot get married or try to get divorced, we cannot die and leave our property to our children without calling on the lawyers to guide us. In the evolution of law, lawyers have continually expanded time and labor to increase the tribute they collect from the public for the common transactions of everyday life. Their living depends on the rest of society accepting their claim to being useful. They must themselves believe and defend that claim or lose their moral right to compensation.