On the Social Significance of Large Law Firm Practice
In a widely publicized report, Derek Bok, President of Harvard University and former law school professor and dean, recently observed: A nation's values and problems are mirrored in the ways in which it uses its ablest people. InJapan, a country only half our size, 30 percent more engineers graduate each year than in all the United States. ButJapan boasts a total of less than 15,000 lawyers, while American universities graduate 35,000 every year. It would be hard to claim that these differences have no practical consequences. As the Japanese put it, "Engineers make the pie grow larger; lawyers only decide how to carve it up."1