The legal profession has become a primary source of immense social costs that actively undermine the nation’s democratic and economic foundations. Those costs manifest in concrete, highly destructive strategies utilized by elite government attorneys to advance authoritarian maneuvers. The public should be profoundly alarmed when lawyers within the Department of Justice’s "Weaponization Working Group" break institutional protocols to orchestrate vindictive criminal indictments against political adversaries; when senior legal officials engineer a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded "Anti-Weaponization Fund" completely decoupled from traditional judicial or congressional overview; or when White House counsel draft specious legal memos to justify blanket executive immunity and dismantle civil service protections.
It is vital to understand that government lawyers are willing to inflict these social costs in the pursuit of long-term financial rewards. Because we cannot count on those lawyers to self-correct, we must significantly reduce the private rewards derived from public compliance by completely deregulating the legal profession.
By degrading decades of post-Watergate norms governing prosecutorial independence, government lawyers are transforming the apparatus of justice from blindfolded impartiality into a targeted weapon for partisan retribution. In replacing the rule of law with a rule of transactional leverage, they are introducing pervasive institutional fragility into our governing bodies. The long-term social cost is a fractured society where laws are no longer respected as consensual rules of cooperation but feared as instruments of raw political power.
While some government lawyers undoubtedly support those harmful actions for pure ideological reasons, the vast majority are driven by a cold, post-government economic career calculation. They view public service as a long-term human capital investment that will be heavily rewarded once they transition back to the private sector. Under the current self-regulated regime of occupational licensing, this gamble is entirely logical. The legal profession functions as a state-sanctioned guild, utilizing the American Bar Association (ABA) and state-level unauthorized practice of law (UPL) restrictions to maintain a monopoly over professional credentials and earn large economic rents.
Initiated by the states, comprehensive entry deregulation—the complete elimination of mandatory ABA educational standards, the repeal of occupational licensing, and the abolition of UPL restrictions—would permanently disrupt elite government lawyers’ career calculus without harming the public. It would vastly extend the market for legal services while generating transparent information about lawyers, their values, and their empirical performances.
In a deregulated legal profession, as in other industries, market discipline matters. In this instance, market discipline incentivizes government lawyers to refuse to execute the specific abuses currently threatening the state. Under the current regime, a prosecutor inside the "Weaponization Working Group" can hide behind the institutional anonymity of a DOJ title and a state bar license. In a fully deregulated market, individual career advancement becomes entirely dependent on platform-verified reputations, transparent public tracking, and third-party quality audits. If a DOJ operative breaks legal norms and Justice protocol to orchestrate a politically motivated indictment, that specific behavioral pattern is immediately flagged on an unalterable public ledger.
Mainstream corporate law firms, institutional investors, and Fortune 500 clients are risk-averse; they cannot afford the brand damage and shareholder liability associated with retaining legal providers linked to systemic institutional manipulation. Currently, state bar disciplinary actions are woefully insufficient. Corrupt former government lawyers, such as Jeffrey Clark or John Eastman, have faced sluggish, multi-year bar investigations while retaining their licenses and actively fundraising off their infamy. In contrast, an open market relies on instantaneous reputational pricing. The operative knows that signing off on a fraudulent indictment instantly triggers total corporate exclusion upon exiting government. The multi-million dollar private-sector partner slots vanish, leaving them economically blackballed. Facing the certainty of immediate post-government career erasure, the operative is structurally compelled to say no.
Similarly, senior legal officials currently face zero personal risk when drafting the administrative bylaws for a rogue, $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund". Full entry deregulation strips away this state-subsidized protection. In addition, training under a multidisciplinary, policy-oriented curriculum will condition them to calculate the massive deadweight losses and systemic legal exposure generated by an unconstitutional, multi-billion dollar slush fund. They also will learn that the market heavily penalizes providers who create structural instability. If they design an unauthorized administrative vehicle that explicitly decouples billions in taxpayer funds from congressional and judicial overview, their personal score on public transparency and risk-assessment platforms will permanently collapse, severely jeopardizing their future employability.
Critics will inevitably counter that a figure like President Trump could always find some lawyer to carry out his wishes, suggesting deregulation changes nothing. This dismissal fundamentally misunderstands the macroeconomic realities of legal capital. While fringe actors will always exist, deregulation strips them of their power. Currently, an occupational license grants rogue lawyers an unearned aura of institutional legitimacy—allowing them to act as state-sanctioned officers of the court while rubber-stamping authoritarianism. Deregulation dismantles this state-sponsored shield. Without the backing of a protected cartel, a fringe operative is recognized by the market simply as a partisan liability.
As the free market blackballs elite participants through immediate reputational pricing, corrupt executives are left only with incompetent loyalists. As recent history demonstrates, the shoddy, error-riddled legal frameworks drafted by fringe operatives routinely face immediate judicial injunctions, collapse under basic procedural scrutiny, and ultimately fail to secure their authoritarian objectives.
I have previously argued that states should initiate the process of deregulating the legal profession on the grounds that it would improve access to justice and significantly reduce lawyers’ enormous economic rents without harming the public. However, in light of government lawyers recently helping to undermine the performance of and public confidence in government by trading institutional integrity for guaranteed future private wealth, deregulation’s strongest argument may be that it could reduce enormous social costs by restraining political weaponization in government and by preserving democratic governance and our system of checks and balances.
