Modern law has many failings but biases among judges favoring lawyers does not rank high on the list.

Here are some truly important things that favor the legal profession at the possible expense of others and these generally have nothing to do with judges:

1. Lawyers operate in the equivalent of a closed guild system that restricts the availability of legal services to the public and that causes fees to be artificially inflated. Lawyers need to be licensed in any given state in order to practice law and, even if licensed in one state, cannot practice in any other state unless licensed there as well. Lawyers also were historically subject to significant restrictions on being able to advertise and promote their services and many restrictions persist to this day. These licensing requirements and advertising restrictions are not established by judges but by legislators who take it upon themselves to define standards for the practice of law in the name of protecting clients.

2. Expansionist view of law as an instrument of social change have transformed the legal profession from a modest service business into a mega-industry over the past five or six decades. When I started practicing law in the late 1970s, I would marvel at how, e.g., all reported federal cases spanning a couple of hundred years took up x shelf space through 1960 while those for 1960 and on took 10x (and were growing exponentially). The San Francisco firm I started with had been formed in the 1880s and, even up to the early 1960s, had no more than 25 lawyers in it at any given time - today, it has over 1,000 lawyers. What has brought on such changes? Vast new federal statutes that defined whole new categories of liabilities, highly liberalized pleading and discovery rules that let pretty much any case get to trial at enormous expense to those being sued, radical new types of cases such as class actions that promoted mega-litigation - all these and more have brought about an exponential growth rate in the legal field, and none of these has to do with judicial bias favoring lawyers.

3. The "American rule" specifying that each party normally must bear his own attorneys' fees (as opposed to the "English rule" specifying that the loser pays the winning side's fees) enables litigants to freely file crap-shoot cases at little risk to themselves in hopes of extorting nuisance settlements or worse from those being sued.

4. Lawyer in-breeding creates mutual back-scratching. Big Law consists of mega-firms of all types, those that promote big litigation and those who defend against such litigation. Yet, all are united in promoting political and legislative changes that enable such litigation to continue to expand. Here is where the vested interests lie and, in this sense, judges can occasionally sympathize in being part of the club (in this sense the study conducted in this piece rings partially true).

Since law does not lend itself to skilled handling by those untrained in its technical aspects, it is unrealistic to expect that citizen judges will provide the answer to curbing the exponential growth in the legal profession and in the scale of fees charged. If reform is to be sought, the answers must mostly lie elsewhere.