In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber advocates price regulation and subsidization of legal services, so as to counter the advantages that the rich enjoy in our legal system. I criticize his argument here. My argument begins:

In days of old, litigants would hire champions to assert their claims in trial by battle. The rich could afford more skilled warriors, and so were more likely to win their lawsuits (and less likely to lose their heads). One could imagine proto-liberals at the time proposing, quite sensibly, that everyone receive a champion of equal quality. Whether this would have improved justice is another matter.