<p>It is odd that the NY Times article appeared on the front page since it offers nothing new, or nothing that anyone who is familiar with professional schooling and law in particular didn’t already know.</p>
<p>Law school does provide a basic grounding in law, and that includes the history and foundations of the field. Obviously, knowing how property rights developed in pre-modern Europe will not provide the template for a recent law school graduates to oversee a real estate closing in 2011. However, they can get a set of documents from any number of sources nowadays and cut and paste them if they want to. That’s the easy part. Why spend the time in law school going over a process that may take an hour or two to master? What students do learn instead are the principles which allow them to analyze the needs in a given situation and devise the proper response to those needs. </p>
<p>Of course, there is on-the-job training in any field, and that is not simply true of the first year or two on the job. I’m not a lawyer–so if the illustration I used above is not precisely correct, don’t flame me–and I’m constantly having to learn new things about my field.</p>