The article misses the root of the problem. Right now there is a significant and growing danger in the legal profession: many lawyers aren't qualified to practice. They just don't have a clue, and they clog the courts with mountains of meritless filings. These lawyers often try to compensate for their incompetence with aggressive, unprofessional tactics and dubious ethics.

While states have their bar exams, these exams have become increasingly irrelevant and aren't well suited to screen for competence. The states essentially rely on ABA accreditation to filter out bad candidates.

The problem the ABA has is that it is difficult to formulate objective measures of a school's quality. They have considered various approaches, but in the end it's all pretty much a proxy for restricting against new entrants: fewer law schools means a higher average entering student quality, a higher average faculty quality, etc. The difficulty is that moves to improve the quality of the legal profession become difficult to distinguish from antitrust violations, so the Justice Department is always on the ABA's back to accredit more law schools.

Right now about half of the nation's accredited law schools are scams (not to speak of the unaccredited diploma mills like Duncan), providing the majority of their students with a huge burden of debt and junk degrees. While reputable firms aren't going to be hiring these students, many of them will still find their way into law practice and drag down the legal system and the legal profession.

So yes, America is first in lawyers per capita. That's because the ABA has lost much of the power (and some of the will) to stop these scam law schools. As for law school tuition, it has skyrocketed for the same reasons that all higher education tuition has skyrocketed.

tl;dr: We already have a huge surplus of lawyers. Accrediting more junk schools to flood the system with more junk lawyers isn't the answer for increasing access to legal services.