Károly Halmos: The "market" and the liberal professions

The question of "too many or too few lawyers" and the market is, in my view, linked. I will try to formulate my conclusion in a model form. What I have to say is background material that may help to sort things out.

On the question of the market, one must first consider what a lawyer ultimately does. Although other legal titles are mentioned in the essay, it is worth listing them: Rechtsanwalt, Advokat, advocaat, procurator, solicitor. In their original meaning, the words mean to enforce the law, to promote a cause, to enable someone to make a statement, to act as a guardian of the case. To upset something from its resting place.

Let the physician be our counterpoint. The medic does the opposite, he heals, he brings someone back to a state of rest. 

On a very abstract level, we have to consider who and what are the objects of the activity of physicians and lawyers. The physician, at a level of abstraction, is concerned with his patients. Patients are in fact - if there is no social insurance - the patients who are able to pay. The physician provides them with a personal service. The limit to these personal services is the number of solvent patients. 
In the case of lawyers, the situation of criminal lawyers is similar: their clients are the solvent offenders ('the legally disabled').

If a certain proportion of people are sick or "disenfranchised", and a physician or criminal lawyer can treat a certain number of patients/offenders at a given "moment", then the number of physicians needed is a proportion of the population that does not depend on the number of the population. The need for them grows like the population itself.

By contrast, the object of the activity of lawyers in the field of civil law, even if they are dealing with clients, is contracts. Let us assume that a certain proportion of the population needs contracts requiring legal services and that this proportion is able to pay for them. The situation of this fraction can be compared to the ancient concept of commercium, the capacity to act. 

It follows from the premise that these people make contracts between themselves. If everyone were to contract with everyone else, then, for one contract per pair, the number of contracts would be equivalent to calculating the number of games in a high school combinatorial problem, the football league. The number of contracts follows the number of clients squared. This does not change even if not everyone contracts with everyone. Within the model, as the population changes, the number of contracts to be handled will increase quadratically, so the change in the number of lawyers needed is not independent of the population size.

All we need to assume is that the proportion of the population that can be considered as clients decreases less than squared, and it follows that the proportion of lawyers needed in the population must have increased more than the population itself. This also means that, whatever the starting point, the need for lawyers will at some point exceed the need for physicians, and that court lawyers will be in the minority relative to their counterparts handling contracts. 

This model does not explain the phenomenon, often mentioned in the thesis, of a few lawyers occupying a large number of institutional positions. The explanation lies in the principle of " to he who has, it is given ", which in economics is discussed under the heading of externalities and in network theory under the heading of scale independence, and its explanation in terms of individual behaviour can be understood briefly in terms of the behavioural rule " the well-trodden path is not to be left for the untrodden ". 

(Slightly modified excerpt from Károly Halmos' reflection on Viktor Papp: The social history of the legal profession in dualist Hungary, given at the debate of the dissertation. ELTE BTK, 28 January 2022.)