Well, how about that? In an interview for Britain’s Daily Telegraph on a lot of other subjects, Antonin Scalia offered, perhaps without invitation, his opinion on the prominence of laws and (hence) lawyers in his country. It’s at the very end of this article, and he notes that law is the major seemingly chosen in college by all of America’s best and brightest.
A parallel that comes to my mind concerns Argentina, not exactly everyone’s first choice for a progressive, prosperous country among those making up the world late in the last century. There, at least since the Fifties, and continuing, if not to today, then at least through the Eighties, EVERYONE majored in law. Anything else respectable (doctor? engineer?) evidently involved too much work, or work that was too difficult.
Parallels between Argentina and the US are numerous to my eyes. I hope they become less so, one way or the other (maybe Argentina will change).