ring the costs of eye glasses and prescription drugs had an impact primarily on the profit margins of opticians and druggists. Lowering the costs of legal services, however, resulted in monetary judgments that, in turn, have caused such staggering increases in the costs of liability insurance, that consumers must now pay what appear to be exorbitantly high prices for child daycare, prescription drugs, and physicians' services in particular, as well as many other products and services.12
Two factors have been singled out as the underlying causes of the excesses that are found in the transformed approach of Americans to the use of law in the early 1990s. The first of
10"A Plague of Lawyers," The Economist, 10 August 1991, 13; Olson, 27 28.
12Gordon Crovitz, "Lawyers on Trial," Policy Review, No. 35 (1986): 72; Richard K. Willard, "Wheel of Fortune," Policy Review, No. 36 (1986): 40.
these factors is the proportion of lawyers to the population at large in the Unit
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