A NIGHTMARISH vision set out in 1985 by the American folk singer Tom Paxton has come true: the United States now has more than one million licensed lawyers.

The disclosure came after California enrolled its 200,000th lawyer this week, swelling the national ranks of the legal profession to 1,084,504, according to the American Bar Association. That is a 65 per cent increase since 1985.

Growth in the number of lawyers is unlikely to stop, with the celebrity trials of Michael Jackson and Robert Blake, along with lawyer-based television chat shows such as Larry King Live, creating huge interest in America’s criminal system.

Meanwhile, evidence of lawyers’ influence is everywhere, including liability-reducing stickers on toddlers’ pushchairs that warn parents to “remove child before folding”, or the case in which a man sued the police for not arresting him for public intoxication, thus allowing him to crash a car while driving drunk.

Lawyers in the Supreme Court even decided America’s election results after the disputed presidential race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore. “I think attorneys serve an important purpose,” Danika Vittitoe, who is California’s 200,000th lawyer, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Tom Paxton, who recently won a BBC folk award before starting a 13-show tour of Britain does not agree. “Oh, a suffering world cries for mercy, ” he lamented in 1985. “As far as the eye can see/Lawyers around every bend in the road/Lawyers in every tree.” The chorus repeats the line: “In ten years we’re gonna have one million lawyers.” He was eventually proved right, although it took longer than ten years.

Jokes about lawyers, meanwhile, are well circulated by Americans on the internet. “You’re trapped in a room with a tiger, a rattlesnake, a lawyer and a gun with two bullets, what do you do?” goes one of them. The punchline, of course, is: “Shoot the lawyer twice.”

The proliferation of lawyers, and particularly “frivolous” lawsuits against doctors and other professionals, became a national political issue during the 2004 election campaign, with President Bush using voters’ distrust of the legal profession to damage John Edwards, the former trial lawyer and Democratic vice-presidential candidate.

The Bush Administration has promised to cut back the huge damages awarded in personal-injury and medical malpractice litigation, while criticising lawyers’ influence and their fees, which leave many poorer Americans without legal help unless they are charged with a crime. Some prominent lawyers claim that Americans are “over-lawyered and under-represented”.The growth in lawyers is also likely to keep drawing criticism from the likes of Catherine Crier, a former lawyer and judge who wrote a book in 2002 called The Case Against Lawyers. It is lawyers, Ms Crier argues, who end up getting the spoils of over-the-top claims at the expense of everyone else. “You can’t win,” she wrote. “But the lawyers will.”

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