What country in the world has most lawyers per capita?

Answer

U.S.A.: There is one lawyer for every 265 Americans.

Brazil follows closely with one lawyer on every 326 Brazilians.

Clarification: While it looks like the US has the most number of lawyers, the per capita numbers suggest Spain and Italy are not "by far" the most although the 1MM+ number is staggering.

Country Lawyers Population People/Lawyer

US: Lawyers: 1,143,358 Pop: 303MM P/L:265
Brazil: Lawyers: 571,360 Pop: 186MM P/L: 326
New Zealand: Lawyers: 10,523 Pop: 4MM P/L 391

Spain Lawyers:114,143 Pop: 45MM P/L:395
Italy Lawyers:121,380 Pop: 59MM P/L:488
UK Lawyers:151,043 Pop: 61MM P/L401
Germany Lawyers:138,679 Pop: 82MM P/L: 593
France Lawyers:45,686 Pop: 64MM P/L: 1,403

Among the Top 7 "lawyerly countries" listed above, the US has about 50% of the lawyers, with 37 percent of the population of this group.

There is a myth that the US has seventy percent of the world's lawyers, but the numbers above show that this is wrong.

India alone has around one million lawyers, about the same absolute number as th US, although its per capita number is only a quarter or fifth of th US (see http://www.lawyersweekly.ca/index.php?section=article&articleid=580).

This means the US has a much smaller portion of the overall total than 70 percent, or even 50 percent.

The lawyer number for the US comes from the ABA (active) for 2007: http://www.abanet.org/marketresearch/2007_Natl_Lawyer_FINALonepage.pdf for the other countries I used the data from the Council of European Lawyers (active when stated)

The lawyer number for Brazil comes from Brazilian's ABA equivalent OAB (active) for 2007: http://www.oab.org.br/relatorioAdvOAB.asp

http://www.ccbe.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/NTCdocument/table_number_lawyers1_1179905628.pdf

The population numbers were pulled on Jan 2nd 2008 from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population

Of course, with 2.2 million people in US prisons, that means there is about 1 lawyer for every inmate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisons_in_the_United_States#Population_statistics

First answer by ID0204030282. Last edit by Lotz. Contributor trust: 3 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 39 [recommend question]