More Lawyers + Fewer Crimes = Tough Times for Young Lawyers

As we know, it's hard to be a young lawyer these days, mainly because there are more lawyers chasing less work. Today I want to look at one particularly stark example of this, which is actually caused by the intersection of two separate trends:

1) The long term rise in the number of lawyers in the United States; and
2) The continuing decrease in the amount of crimes committed in the United States.

Together, these trends have drastically reduced the number of potential clients available for young criminal defense lawyers. Keep this in mind when old criminal defense lawyers who hung out their shingles during the golden age of criminal defense (1968-1992) make fun of the young lawyers trying to do the same thing in today's much harsher environment

More Lawyers

Since 1969, the per capita rate of licensed lawyers in the US has increased 150%, from 1.6 per 1,000 people to 4.0:

Fewer Crimes

For a while—and purely by coincidence I'm sure—the proliferation of lawyers was accompanied by a proliferation of crime. Crime exploded from 1960 to 1980, dropped off for a few years, and then peaked again in 1991. Since then, however, the crime rate has plummeted, and the major crime rate is now lower than it was when the lawyer-boom began in 1969. The following chart shows the rate of the FBI's "Part I" crimes (a combination of the violent crimes and the major property crimes):

Major Crimes Per Lawyer: Dropping like a Brick

Put the two trends together, and here is what you get:

Between 1968 and 1991, there were an average of 22 major crimes per licensed lawyer. In 2012, that number was down to 8, and there is every reason to believe that the bottom is still dropping out. In the 70s and 80s, criminal lawyers could afford to be choosy, and the lack of competition meant there was little need to compete on price. Times have changed.

Arrests Per Lawyer Dropping Too

One objection to the graphs above is that the crime rate is not strictly speaking relevant to the number of potential clients for lawyers; what matters is the arrest rate. The arrest data I could find only goes back to 1980, but that's far enough to tell the same story. Here are the number of arrests for major crimes per lawyer since 1980:

Between 1980 and 1991, there were an average of 3.9 arrests per lawyer. By 2012, that had dropped had dropped 56% to 1.7.  Roughly speaking, in the 80s there were twice as many arrests for major crimes per lawyer as there have been in the 21st century.

Expanding the data to look at all arrests again paints the same general picture:

In this graph you can see the effect of the drug war, which kept the overall arrest rate from dropping too steeply until 1997. Still, from peak to trough, there are twice as many lawyers per arrest than there was just a generation ago.

Obviously, it's a very good thing that there's so much less crime now than there used to be. But criminal defense has historically been one of the main practice areas available to solo practitioners and small firms, even for lawyers just graduating from law school. That opportunity likely no longer exists, as the older, established criminal defense lawyers now snap up the vast majority of the much scarcer work. 

This dynamic is exacerbated by the demographic shift in the legal profession. In 1980, a full 50% of lawyers were under 40. By 2005, only 26% of lawyers were under 40, and the median lawyer age was up to 49. There are a lot more experienced lawyers than there used to be, and given the nature of legal services older lawyers have a big competitive advantage. 

A Fiercer Market

Being a lawyer has, undoubtedly, always been difficult, and it always took hard work to succeed. But it takes more hard work and more luck than it used to, at least for young lawyers who didn't graduate from top schools or at the top of their classes.  So it's a bit ridiculous when the old-timers make fun of the recent law grads as the "slackoisie" without acknowledging the demographic and social factors that made things so much easier for them—particularly when the market for legal services used to be significantly bigger precisely because those baby boomers were so, so much more likely to be criminals. 

Unnecessary crime of the day: Hazing

Following up on my post about Judge Posner's musings on things that don't need to be crimes, here is a fresh example: hazing.

This will be a continuing series. 

Posner on Decriminalization

Judge Posner has a lengthy essay / book review in the New Republic, discussing the topic of crime and punishment and the fact that too many Americans are in prison. It is worth a read.

Like me, Judge Posner thinks there should be fewer crimes. Decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs is the low-hanging fruit, but Posner does not stop there:

There are also other candidates for decriminalization, such as prostitution and copyright infringement (which should be just a civil offense); and it is time that the age of consent were reduced to 16 or even 15, in recognition of contemporary sexual mores. Gambling should be decriminalized, and probably environmental offenses as well, such as killing a migratory bird; such offenses should be left to the civil law, with its financial sanctions.

I'm with him on prostitution, of course, but some of his other ideas strike me as a little strange—or at least trivial. How many people are wasting away in prison on a copyright rap? And would changing the age of consent from 16 to 15 make any difference whatsoever to prison populations?

I'm all for legalizing all forms of gambling, but again I wonder how many people actually go to jail on gambling offenses. When I was a law clerk, Judge Rosenbaum did preside over a money-laundering trial that came out of an FBI take down of a St. Paul bookie operation, so it's not fanciful. But the defendant who was convicted (one was acquitted) was sentenced to probation. My understanding is that most money laundering and gambling prosecutions are efforts to go after the more public manifestations of organized crime. So I guess if you made gambling legal it might have the side-benefit of making organized crime less profitable.

I guess I'd be okay with decriminalizing migratory bird murder, too, but it would be pretty far down the list as well.

What do you think, Mr. Gillette? Should the Man get out of the copyright-enforcement racket? Any other crimes you'd like to see taken off the books?

Tattoos part deux

Last month, I posted about a gentleman accused of murder in Kansas had to bring a motion asking the court to allow him to cover up a tattoo on his neck that spelled "MURDER" (or "REDRUM" depending on how you were looking at it). At the time, I thought it was sort of a unique motion. I was wrong. This month brings a similar motion in an Indiana murder trial.

First thought is not always the best thought.

I belong to the generation of people that cannot point to World War II or the Great Depression as a thing that made my childhood rough. Instead, the thing I can point out to children as being rough about my childhood is that people only got 3 or 4 channels on their TV.* These were ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. If I recall correctly, the only baseball we could watch was the Game of the Week on Saturday afternoon. Since it was often nice out when the game was airing, I did not watch it very much.

The United States is Still Paying a Veteran's Pension ...

... to the child of a Civil War vet.

Punk in Drublic (apologies to NOFX)

The Arizona Republic has a story about a recent ruling by the Arizona Court of Appeals that overturned a Scottsdale, Arizona ordinance that prohibited being drunk in public. The ruling is here. Why can't the city ban being drunk in public? Because it turns out that an Arizona state law prevents local governments (counties, municipalities, or "other" political subdivisions) from adopting or enforce any local law, ordinance or resolution includes "being a common drunkard or being found in an intoxicated condition" as one of the elements of a criminal offense. The state law has been on the books for over 40 years. 

Is Oklahoma ok?

Two recent news items caught my interest this morning. The first is Slate's story about a study by the National Academy of Sciences that 1 in 25 criminal defendants sentenced to death in the United States are actually innocent. The other is this story about a botched execution in Oklahoma. As a result of the botched execution, Clayton Lockett "convulsed several times," spoke three times after prison officials tried to declare that Mr. Lockett was unconscious and according to USA Today eventually died of a heart attack 40 minutes after the execution began.

When a tattoo might mean trouble.

The poet Alan Ginsberg used the motto "first thought best thought" as his guiding principal on how to be a fearless writer. Should that motto apply when the writing in question is a tattoo?

A nice return on an investment.

In 1985, former Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl purchased the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team for $18 million. According to ESPN, Senator Kohl is now selling a majority interest in the team for $550 million. The Bucks had a record of 15-67 this year, which is the worst record of any team in the NBA. I know the value of an NBA franchise is not based entirely on the team's record but one wonders what price Senator Kohl could have gotten for the team if it had been good.