But of course, some attorneys believe that title searching is practicing law, at least technically... and I suppose the research needed to come up with a proposal for a federal land title system would be the practice of law as well. 

I think the problem is not that a law professor is putting out an opinion on this, because i think that it is a good thing that folks are thinking about ways to improve things, even if their ideas turn out to be flawed.  The problem here is that the opinion does not appear to be very complete or very well informed.