Law versus Economics

Research into the effects of lawyers on the U.S. economy has fallen into an unfortunate pattern. First, a series of finance professors empirically demonstrated that lawyers were impairing economic growth.' Then, a law professor sought to rebut this claim and found no statistically significant evidence of the negative effect of lawyers.2 Next, a finance professor refined his statistical methodology and produced new results showing a negative consequence of an alleged excess of U.S. lawyers.3 Now, in Epp's article, a political scientist's rejoinder reports that no clear negative effect can be found in the statistics.4 Any follower of the debate must be tempted to subscribe to Disraeli's taxonomy of damned lies, and statistics

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