But on a more general level (in the rest of his book), Bork’s book is a love declaration towards more economics in the system, incl. in the courts : “The reasons for the inadequate performance of the legal institutions that shape AT policy is a complex topic. No single institution is wholly responsible, but perhaps it can be said that the factor common to the performance of all of them was, and is, the absence of a rudimentary understanding of market economics. Few of the actors in the process, however, seemed to display any lackof self confidence in economic argument (p.409)”.

My thoughts were most likely influenced by some specific cases I had in mind, and it’s good to be able to refine them through these questions.

As to the first question on whether consumers of legal services would bother to read written submissions, it’s very likely that they wouldn’t in most cases, but (i) having the opportunity to do so when needed would be good; and (ii) other lawyers or academics could have access to those documents and good or bad lawyers would then be exposed. Over time, “the market” would end up having a better informed sense of who is good and of who isn´t.

As to the second question, written submissions or hearing transcripts are certainly not the key to good competition lawyering, but they are a very good proxy to assess litigation habilities (a subset of those that a good competition lawyer should ideally have). Of course written Court submissions failt to capture many other skills. Also, as I wrote in the original post, transparency of legal submissions could contribute to remedying some bad lawyering: there are a few reputed lawyers who would probably cease resorting to some practices if they knew their work could be exposed.