"[E]very state but Wisconsin and Nebraska (plus Washington, D.C.) is producing many more lawyers than it needs..."

Fascinating, but there's something about Wisconsin that the NYT doesn't know! And it's not that we've (apparently) gone crazy. It's that in Wisconsin, if you graduate from a Wisconsin law school — i.e., the University of Wisconsin or Marquette — you can have the "diploma privilege," which means you can join the bar without the pesky step of taking the bar exam. So if you're going to estimate the number of lawyers entering the Wisconsin bar by looking at the number of people who passed the bar, you're going to be ludicrously off!