My colleague Dana Remus has an essay on the deregulation of the legal profession, "Hemispheres Apart, a Profession Connected," up on ssrn. Cribbing now from her abstract:
In recent years, a number of scholars have built upon the bifurcated nature of the legal profession with proposals to relax professional regulation in just one of the profession’s hemispheres. Some advocate a relaxation of unauthorized practice rules in the personal services hemisphere to increase competition, decrease prices, and make legal services more accessible to all segments of the population. Others propose a relaxation of particular client protections in the corporate hemisphere to honor client autonomy and choice. In this essay, I explore the unintended and problematic consequences of these proposals. I argue that although scholars advocating the two sets of changes have divergent goals and motivations, their proposals suffer from a common flaw—they fail to account for the extent and significance of linkages that connect the profession’s hemispheres. Focusing on these linkages, I argue that proposals to relax regulation along the profession’s existing structural contours threaten to exaggerate and entrench wealth and power disparities in the profession and in society at large.
This continues Dana's work on the people who are doing things that might — or might not — be considered legal work (such as her article on lawyers who are "out of pratice" but working at jobs where a legal credential may be useful). In this case it is about the deregulation of what we typically think of as legal work.
I heard Dana workshop an earlier version of this last fall. I'm really intrigued by the number of people — many of whom I usually think of as on the left — who are in favor of deregulation. What really strikes me about this approach is that it seems to represent the triumph of the age of Reagan. Where those who were most interested in extension of legal services in the 1970s and 1980s were — I should suppose — were also deeply interested in regulation, now everyone seems to be embracing deregulation.