We've long maintained that in general the things lawyers do tend to shrink the economic pie rather than expand it, at the expense of societal prosperity and innovation. In comments made during a C-SPAN interview as reported by the
Wall Street Journal, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia seems to agree:
I mean lawyers, after all, don’t produce anything. They enable other people to produce and to go on with their lives efficiently and in an atmosphere of freedom. That’s important, but it doesn’t put food on the table and there have to be other people who are doing that. And I worry that we are devoting too many of our very best minds to this enterprise.
