In keeping with the wider debate on the liberalisation of regulated professions in Europe, this paper is a critical introduction to the economics of regulation applied to the lawyer’s profession. Resting on traditional public economics and industrial economics literature, this literature prove itself to be dated. Then, it does not bring any innovation from the analyses on the deregulation of traditional goods’ markets and are out of real practical reach. It induces conflicting theoretical proposals that empirical studies do not allow to settle once and for all. Moreover, attention has been fully focalized on the question of either deregulating the profession or maintaining its regulation. This occults the issue on the identity of the regulator: should the profession being self-regulated or not?
