The idea of deregulation of the legal profession became mainstream - "thanks" to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor's attempt to enslave the legal profession

On May 18, 2016, just last week, I posted a blog about the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor claiming that "forced labor" is good, if it forces the legal profession to serve the poor.

A great argument - for a communist state.

In the U.S., such an argument will eventually legitimize any forced labor under any circumstances - and is a violation of the 13th Amendment and attorneys' due process rights to own their time, their bodies (and not being forced to appear somewhere for free), as well as their income.

Imagine any one of you, my dear readers, are required to provide work for free, as a condition of being able to work and earn a living for your family.

I've been arguing on this blog for two and a half years so far that what needs to be done to close the "justice gap" is to deregulate the legal profession and allow consumers to choose for themselves who they want to represent them in court.

Going from "government knows better who would represent you in court", "you can only choose government-approved/licensed court representatives for yourself" to "a government-approved slave will represent you for free as a condition of earning a living, and will do it well out of professional pride", is going from bizarre to more bizarre.

For the 2.5 years of existence of this blog, my ideas towards deregulation of the legal profession were shared only by economists and consumers, but not by attorneys or "mainstream" law professors.

That is, until May 20, 2016 when George Mason Law School professor Ilya Somin openly opposed Sonya Sotomayor's appeal for forced labor as a condition to practice law.

While stating that forced labor never was, and won't close the "justice gap" for the poor, nor will provide effective or even competent and diligent services, Professor Somin offered three solutions to the problem of the justice gap:

1) deregulation of the legal profession;
2) corporatization of legal services and bundling them with other services - which is not allowed in the U.S. at this time, and is a method introduced in other countries, too, to make legal services more efficient, and with an opportunity for financing of legal services within one corporation by the entire corporation, which may derive income from another business;
3) giving directly the eligible litigants (the poor) paid governmental vouchers to hire an attorney, so that the litigant will be able to chose his own counsel, and thus provide an incentive for attorneys to compete for the vouchers and provide good services.

A law professor who is far from being a radical is offering deregulation as a mainstream issue to help the poor, while attorney regulation is offered to the public as a means to protect interests of consumers (including the poor) - showing that the professor does not believes in authenticity of such declarations, and deems regulation of attorneys as not protecting the consumers, but doing the opposite, hurting the consumers.

Moreover, the idea of offering vouchers directly to the litigants to hire their own attorney is downright brilliant, as it solves several problems at the same time:

1) vouchers given directly to the litigants will eliminate control by judges of assignments of counsel in criminal and family court cases, and by that, assigning cases to either connected attorneys, or attorneys who judges favor;  to keep on the assigned counsel list, attorneys will not raise sensitive issues or zealously represent their clients, if that would cause displeasure of the often pro-prosecution and pro-government judge;

2) quality of legal services for the poor will get better, because the poor litigant will be given an opportunity to "vote with their vouchers" and choose only those attorneys who provide good legal services, which will be defined by word of mouth assessments of litigants, and by online ratings.

It appears that the end of attorney regulation is not that far away - now that a law professor from a conservative school is vouching for deregulation, corporatization and voucherization of legal services.

I will monitor how the idea of deregulation and removing control over who represents the poor on assigned cases, will develop and will continue to cover these issues in my blog.

Stay tuned.