It’s just numbers. When I came out of law school it wasn’t out of the ordinary to face $100,000 in tuition. I hear it’s much higher now. Public service positions don’t pay much at all. One can assume there is a definite amount of people who desire a public service job but cannot possibly do so with their student loan bills. How large this number is, of course, is unknown, but I don’t think it is such a stretch to say they exist.

Thanks for the shout out Jordan!

As for increasing the number of lawyers seeking to serve society rather than make money, a small quibble with your quote: I suggested not that not free tuition would attract more publicly-minded law students, but that free legal services (and the consequent lower average salary) would — or at the very least, would discourage the singularly money-minded applicants. We all had classmates in law school who were clearly motivated by the money and the prestige that a legal career would bring. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, necessarily, but I think it’s a virtual certainty that a legal profession bent towards the public good would not be much of a draw to them.

Regarding your second point, I agree that “serving the public interest is the cornerstone on which the profession is founded.” But I’d have a hard time being convinced that the public interest is the cornerstone upon which the profession usually operates in practice. With the great majority of the public (including many individual lawyers) effectively unable to access the justice system because of cost and other barriers, and many lawyers seemingly undisturbed by that fact on a day-to-day basis, it’s difficult to support an argument that we are operationally dedicated to the public interest. This is the misalignment between the private-sector profession and the public good of legal services I mentioned.

I don’t think self-governance is inherently incompatible with outside funding: Canada’s doctors, to take one example, bill the government for their services while successfully regulating themselves. Self-governance, to my mind, comes down to trust: the extent to which society trusts a profession to regulate its own internal affairs because the profession is seen to be fair, responsible, transparent, and mindful of the social good it provides. The quid pro quo is in the social compact between the profession and the public. Violate that compact or be seen to be ignoring it — as happened to some lawyer governing bodies in the UK and Australia — and the public, through its government, will intervene and say. “Okay, you had your chance; now we’re going to oversee your operations.” That result, to my mind, is a professional and institutional failure.

Professions of all kinds risk their self-governance not when their bills are paid other than directly by their clients/patients/customers, but when they forget, as you say, that the privilege of their position is not a divinely bestowed right but a gift of trust from the people they serve.

First, do we have any evidence whatsoever for this proposition: “[Free/no tuition would have the result that] More people would go into the law not to make money, but to serve society”? Before tuition fees in Canada were de-regulated, were there more people going into “public service” areas of practice than there are currently? Do those low-fee US law schools which exist graduate more graduates who go into public service than higher-cost law schools? Do law students who graduate with no debt go into public service at a higher rate than their peers who graduate with debt? I’m not saying it’s not possible, but we all seem to simply *assume* that lower (or non-existent) tuition will result in more publicly-minded lawyers, but is that in fact the case?

Second, and fundamentally, I strongly believe that the onus for funding the profession, accepting for the moment that there is a good case for it, would not be the obligation of “the public” but the obligation *of the profession* – serving the public interest is the cornerstone on which the profession is founded. It is the principle animating the grant of self-regulation to the profession. If “society” not only hands over effective control of the profession to the profession but also then agrees to *fund it*, what exactly is the quid pro quo being paid by the profession in all of this?