And for some reason my links were excluded: http://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com/original-research-updated/law-graduate-overproduction/ http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ep/ind-occ.matrix/occ_pdf/occ_23-1011.pdf

Brian, to answer your questions. (1) You're right about bar passage rates being a poor measure of attorney oversupply, and many critics, myself included, quickly pointed out that Wisconsin's alleged shortage is due to its law schools' graduates' ability to obtain a Wisconsin license without taking a bar exam. The ESMI should have just compared graduates to job openings instead. Fortunately for them, I already did that three months ago using BLS and state government data. (2) The BLS in its Occupational Outlook Handbook calculates the growth and replacement rates for specific occupations including lawyers. It does include self-employed lawyers. Here's the BLS's in various industries between 2008 and 2018. State governments, including D.C. and Puerto Rico but excluding South Dakota, calculate the same numbers. I can't speak for EMSI, but the government assumes full employment in the target year 2018. What surprised me is that EMSI's projections are more charitable than mine: it found more than 260,000 lawyer job openings via growth and replacement over the next 10 years while the BLS calculates 240,400 and state governments 197,400. The reason there isn't a shortage of attorneys is that the ABA law schools have been over-enrolled for decades. Simply because there are barriers to entry doesn't entail a shortage, hence my blog's title. The barriers restrict the total number of graduates relative to applicants (though this year is projected to be an all-time low), but those barriers have no bearing on whether there are job openings for them when they graduate. This is because law schools take on none of the financial risk created by the legal sector's volatility. As for prices, the only thing I can say to that is that BEA legal sector deflator data show that the price of legal services has been increasing faster than inflation for a few decades, so I suspect prices are going to drop.