So I was musing on the US legal system just now, and how the abundance of lawyers implies inefficiencies in a society. Most people would be better off if they were able to adequately represent themselves in court, but the preparation and education time makes that prohibitive - adequately defending oneself in court simply isn't possible for most people. This traces back to all the complexity in our legal system. If we were to overhaul the laws, it's possible that we could greatly reduce this problem, but there's still the problem of precedence. You'd still need someone to mine legal archives looking for established precedent, and that's a lot of work and requires training, so we'd still need the same number of lawyers.

This raises the possibility of removing precedent from importance in our legal system, but doing that sacrifices consistency. So I'm wondering, specifically in regards to the importance of precedent in the legal system, what your thoughts on it are? Is the consistency it brings worth all the extra work it creates when holding trials? Or would we be better off throwing it away, and having each trial look at things purely from the applicable laws and the case at hand, ignoring how things were decided in previous similar cases?