The ‘overcrowding the profession’ argument and the professional melting pot

Abstract

In 2012, fourteen law schools operated in Israel: four within universities and ten at private colleges. The number of law students at colleges and accredited attorneys who graduated from the colleges greatly exceeds the number of university law students and alumnae. There is consensus among the leadership of the Israel Bar that law colleges (the newcomers) are responsible for Israel's overpopulation of lawyers and for the legal profession's decline in prestige. Twenty years after the first law colleges were established, the time has come to inquire whether this argument of overcrowding of the profession presents a new 'discovery' or rather the recycling of a standard dynamic between professionals and legal education institutions. The present article examines this issue by evaluating several options: is the profession's 'over-crowdedness' argument an attempt to protect the public, an attempt to prevent competition and to elevate status or rather -as has not been previously suggested -is it an artificial argument aimed (perhaps also unconsciously) at creating a professional melting pot?

Is access to the profession access to justice? Lessons from Canada

“…The transformation of the legal profession in Israel, as discussed by Limor Zer-Gutman, Eyal Katvan and Neta Ziv, is instructive in this regard (Katvan, 2012;Ziv, 2012;Zer-Gutman, 2012). The profession in Israel, following the lowering of barriers to entry in 1995, is on the whole more diverse and more representative of Israeli society, as opposed to the previous judicial-professional elite (Zer-Gutman, 2012;Katvan, 2012, pp.…”

“…18 -19). Care must be taken that maintaining quality does not become a proxy for gatekeeping the profession, aggrandizing legal education, and aspiring for artificial professional homogeneity, as was the case until recently in jurisdictions such as England and Israel (Katvan, 2012;Sherr, 2012). Furthermore, if access to justice means, at least in a narrow, yet important, sense, access to assistance that meets the civil and criminal justice needs of everyday Ontarians, then the barriers to entry into the profession and the accessibility of legal services should be the focus of attention regarding possible solutions.…”

“…For a population of just under 13 million that is roughly a ratio of one lawyer for every 402 Ontarians (Statistics Canada, 2011). This ratio puts Ontario above some jurisdictions, such as South Africa (McQuoid-Mason, 2012), at par with other jurisdictions, such as the United Kingdom, New Zealand (Economides, 2012) and France, but well below the United States with its ratio of one lawyer per 260 residents (Leichter, 2011) and Israel with its ratio of one lawyer to roughly 170 residents (BdiCoface, 2011;Katvan, 2012). Put differently, 20,000 lawyers need to join the profession in Ontario to bring it to American per-capita levels.…”

Hierarchy and Stratification in the Israeli Legal Profession

“…Moreover, as mentioned above, the vast majority of recent law graduates studied at one of the relatively new second‐tier colleges, rather than at one of the four more prestigious university law schools. In 2012–2013, for example, approximately 13,000 students were enrolled in law colleges and only 3,000 in universities (Katvan ; Zer‐Gutman ; Ziv )…”

“…Since the annual number of law college graduates greatly exceeds that of the university law school graduates, and the former tend to be of lower socioeconomic status than the latter, the social and cultural elite's domination of the legal profession has been disrupted. Some view this transformation as destructive to the profession (Katvan ), while others have welcomed it as a change that better reflects Israel's heterogeneous society (Zer‐Gutman ). Yet neither of these views is informed by any sound data and systematic analysis of the actual impact of such transformation on patterns of hierarchy and stratification in the Israeli legal profession.…”