September 02, 2004

Professor Bainbridge pulls from Karl Zinsmeister's excellent column in The Wall Street Journal (subscribers only) ("Today's most aggressive election donors by far are lawyers. As of July, law partners had donated $112 million to 2004 political candidates; by comparison, the entire oil and gas industry donated only $15 million.") and offers interesting analysis of his own. Money quote:

Neither the size of lawyer contributions nor their tilt to the left should surprise anyone. The business of government is producing laws and regulations. Unlike most industries, for whom new regulations can sometimes be a benefit or a cost, lawyers virtually always benefit from new laws and regulations. A new source of liability creates work not just for plaintiffs' lawyers, for example, but also defense lawyers.