academics and more hands-on opportunities. Of course, this is exactly where
legal education in the United States started out—with students “reading the law”
in a lawyer’s office to qualify for admission to the bar. Rejecting that manner of
training as inadequate, the legal profession worked hard in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth century to convert lawyering into an academic subject.13
Although the debate over the proper balance in law schools curricula should
continue, the contribution to this discussion by practitioners would be more
constructive if more practitioners possessed broader knowledge about where the
profession took legal education over the last 150 years.14
In short, we are likely to benefit from careful examination of historical ways
of doing business. We are often timid about the reform of legal structures
because we assume they stand on more hallowed ground than history
demonstrates.