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There’s a huge demand for legal services in the public interest and there’s a ready supply of lawyers who would gladly do it for not a ton of money. But because of student debt we can’t afford to do it for $0, and there are rarely funding structures to help indigent folks. https://twitter.com/mattbruenig/status/1342477375288856578
A simple example: tenants in my area can’t win attorneys fees except in truly extraordinary circumstances. And most tenants can’t afford what a lawyer costs.* That means tenants don’t get lawyers, but landlords do. Imagine what that does across a few thousand cases a year.
*Cost is, of course, relative. As a public defender, my liability insurance is waived, my loan payments are capped at 11% of my salary, and after 10 years I can have my debt forgiven. But I wouldn’t get any of those benefits if I were just a lawyer repping poor folks.
So, in order to pay off my loans and pay my insurance and bar dues I’d have to charge my public interest clients a pretty big overhead, which I wouldn’t be reliably allowed to extract from opponents in court when we won.
So maybe “there isn’t a market,” but that’s not because there isn’t supply and demand. It’s because the rules are designed to keep lawyers’ prices high (distorting the ‘market’) and to limit the protections little guys get (like attys fees) to a few types of cases.
