RALEIGH - Did you know that North Carolina has the lowest ratio of lawyers to people of any state in the nation?

That's one of the key findings in a report entitled "Legal Education in North Carolina" just released by the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. Written by law professors Andrew Morriss and William Henderson, it contains a wealth of information about the state's law schools, including student outcomes, debt loads and average salaries. It also has some provocative recommendations for change.

Morriss and Henderson conclude that North Carolina is "under-lawyered." They argue that a liberalization of the rules on entry into the legal profession would benefit rich and poor alike. As they see it, we have several problems.

One of them is that the state allows only those who have earned degrees from law schools accredited by the American Bar Association to take the bar exam. That rule prevents people in other states who have degrees from non-ABA law schools from entering our comparatively low-competition legal services market.

The obvious question is whether instruction in law schools not accredited by the ABA is good enough. And the answer is that there is little or no educational difference between ABA and non-ABA schools. They all teach contracts, civil procedure, property and other basic legal subjects. They all teach legal research and writing. The professors are all highly educated, competent professionals.

If a graduate of a non-ABA law school is able to pass the bar examination -- as most do where they are allowed to try -- why worry about the school he attended? There's no reason to.

A dirty secret about the American Bar Association is that it deliberately keeps its standards restrictive and costly in order to keep down competition in the legal profession. As Lawrence Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law wrote for the Pope Center last October, "The sad truth is that the ABA mostly serves to drive up the cost of a legal education and keep down the number of people who can enter the profession. What it's doing is good for lawyers already in practice, but bad for Americans who need legal help -- especially poorer ones."

A lawyer can learn his calling every bit as well whether he went to an elite ABA school such as Duke, a non-elite ABA school such as N.C. Central or an unaccredited law school. The fact is that most of what a lawyer needs to know to capably represent people and solve their legal problems isn't learned in law school at all, but is instead learned on the job.

Morriss and Henderson would like to see the state establish its own law school standards, ones that would just focus on the basics. Could the law school curriculum be cut down from its current three years? Certainly. It's widely understood that the third year of law school is merely an expensive waste of time, accumulating course credits just for the sake of fulfilling the degree requirement.

If we opened up our legal system, following the model of California, how would that benefit the poor? Preparation for the legal profession is now so costly that few lawyers can afford to take low-fee cases for poor people. There's a great deal of evidence that more often than not the poor have to do without professional assistance when they need legal help.

And what about the rich? Morriss and Henderson say that with easier entry into North Carolina's legal profession, the state would attract more of the highly skilled transaction lawyers who help facilitate business growth.

Our law has been stuck in a restrictive, competition-suppressing mode for many decades. It is time to think about the benefits of greater freedom in legal education and entering the legal profession.

(George Leef is vice president for research at the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.)