The case of medieval Europe makes for pleasant reading – especially for academics. A new form of human capital (legal training) was discovered, elites supported investments in it by establishing universities and giving students privileges (effectively subsidising training); then, secular and spiritual lords hired the legally-trained to work as administrators, and supported contexts in which legal training was valuable (e.g., markets). However, the fact that Roman legal knowledge spread and was ultimately accepted throughout Europe should not be taken for granted. It was not inevitable.
First, a focal point for all students and scholars interested in learning and teaching about Roman law had to emerge; this coordination problem was solved with the rise of Bologna as the preeminent location of legal teaching.
Second, teachers and students of law needed state protection: in the Middle Ages, foreign students’ and faculty’s legal rights were poorly-defined and left them open to expropriation; they needed protection from townspeople; they needed the right to travel. The establishment and protection of university students’ and faculty’s legal rights was a policy choice made by secular and Church lords. Famously, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa’s Authentica Habita of 1155 granted a range of privileges and protections to students and faculty.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Roman and Canon Law had to be accepted by the rulers of the time as their tool of choice to adjudicate cases and manage an administration.2  Without this form of elite support, choosing to study Roman law might have had too low an expected return for students to invest in the training. In addition, had elites found the study of Roman law useless, they may not have supported it by protecting students – indeed, they might have discouraged it if they found legal study threatening to their positions.
Policy choices made by the ‘states’ of the time – both in the education sector per se, and in the labour market – were thus crucial to the success of the first universities, and the investments made in the new form of human capital that they produced. This pattern was repeated in the public support for many of America’s research universities in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it bears remembering in the 21st century.

As Gabriel Kolko (one of the few historians who did understand regulatory economics) wrote in The Triumph of Conservatism, every major regulatory agency established in the Progressive era was established at the request of the regulated industry. There were consumer complaints of course. But the design and thrust of regulation primarily served the interests of the producers, not the consumers. This was also generally true of the whole slew of regulatory agencies created during the New Deal.