It's moderately quirky that so many US lawmakers are lawyers.
This may be a feature of Anglosphere political systems. UK and Australian parliaments are very lawyer-heavy.
I'd suggest that maybe it is a feature of Common law legal systems, where laws are developed by judges and precedent plays a huge role. The US, UK and Australia are Common Law systems. Civil law, where legal principles are codified into a referable system which serves as the primary source of law, are a lot more easily understood and handled. So maybe the former system makes legal expertise both more challenging and more necessary for lawmaking.
If that hypothesis were true, other common law states (India, Canada, Israel) should tend to have more lawyers in...
Has no one else mentioned this on LW yet?
Elizabeth Edwards has been elected as a New Hampshire State Rep, self-identifies as a Rationalist and explicitly mentions Less Wrong in her first post-election blog post.
Sorry if this is a repost