Kill the laws, not the lawyers

I've heard "kill all the lawyers" jokes since I was a kid. "What do you call 100 dead lawyers? A good start." Heck, even the Eagles song "Get Over It" calls for such a cull.

I understand the source of this sentiment. There are just so many. I recently began working in Los Angeles, and at first it was so nice to see how hard working everybody was. I see many professional-looking people on the train thumbing away on their Blackberries, and talking shop on their cell phones. But then, if I eaves-drop I invariably find that they're talking about court dates, appeals, and other legal affairs.

Is this the proper preoccupation of a productive society? Do we really need such a high proportion of the smartest among us dedicated to sorting out exactly how we use the state to bully and coerce each other?

I think not, and neither, apparently, do the jocular, generally blue collar men who toss around "kill all the lawyers" jokes. They offer a humourous response to a serious problem, but there is a seriously necessary solution. Kill the laws, and the demand for lawyers will dry up. Imagine how much our economy would improve if all these people with a knack for precise writing were writing mechanical engineering literature instead of legalese: or if all these people with an aptitude for complicated systems applied their sharp minds to computer code, instead of legal code .