Sunday, April 15, 2012

Measuring a lawyer surplus

There's a few attempts on the internet at measuring the surplus of lawyers--qualified lawyers for whom there's no jobs available.  My last post compared the 1.2 million individuals carrying law licenses to the 700,000-or-so jobs available.  I'm still working on how the BLS and the Census actually define "lawyer" and "job" and determine whether someone is a lawyer or has a lawyer job under these measures if he is a solo practitioner or a partner in a firm.

There's an interesting model of lawyer surplus created by an outfit called EMSI.  They figure that there will be about 26,000 openings for lawyers every year from 2010-2015, based on a calculation in their proprietary software.  Obviously, this is far fewer than the number of J.D.s that law schools graduate each year, 44,000.  They also have state-by-state estimates which compare the number of jobs that may be open in each state to the number of bar-passers.  The comparison is not favorable in almost any state. 

It also compares the number of jobs available to the number of law school graduates each year in each state.  This is kind of quaint, assuming that people will be more connected to the state where they went to school than they, in reality, probably are.

Monday, April 9, 2012

How many lawyers are there in the United States?

This is a very good question.  The ABA's marketing department reports that in 2010 there were 1,203,452 licensed attorneys in the United States.  Meanwhile, the ABA Section of Legal Education releases numbers that add up there having been 1,531,507 J.D.s awarded since 1964.   Professor Jane Yakowitz estimates that about 150,000 J.D.s have never passed a bar exam--and so generally are not licensed attorneys.  ("Marooned: An Empirical Investigation of Law School Graduates Who Fail the Bar Exam," 60 Journal of Legal Education 3 (2010)).  With the number of attorneys who may have passed away in the past 50 years, and those who have given up their licenses, the 1.2 million licensed attorneys-figure the ABA provides is quite reasonable.

That seems like a lot of lawyers.  But many fewer are not being lawyers.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there were 728,200 lawyers "employed" in the country in 2010.  The Bureau of the Census estimates that there were about 689,000 lawyers and judges (give or take 18,000).


This means that around 500,000 licensed attorneys do not practice.  The number teaching couldn't possibly fill this gap. (I realize I have not precisely investigated the meanings of "lawyer" or "employed" or "judge" in the statistics quoted above, but for now it can't matter very much).  Half a million people, who went to the trouble of as many as 7 years of school, and who absorbed all that cost in tuition and lost wages, aren't using their degrees.

I'm working on what they're doing.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

Short law students

According to the New York Times ("Yale Law School Statistics," May 14, 1894 at 9), Yale Law's class of 1894 was diminutive. The yearbook "Shingle" read, "The average weight of the class is 145 pounds, the average height is five feet 7 inches."

I assume that the Yale class of 1894 was entirely white and male (I haven't got a book in front of me about it). According to the CDC, in 2003-2006 the median (50th-percentile) weight of white male Americans, aged 20-39, was about 186 pounds.  (19-year-olds may have been a little heavier.)  The difference in height was a little less profound, suggesting that modern young people are bulkier.  Median height was 70.4 inches for white males aged 20-39 (19-year-olds were a little closer to 70 inches).