The complex path to becoming a lawyer with a dual legal culture.

The underlying assumption of this draft is that law school is about "the law." On that assumption, "the law" is either learned by inferring generalities from the specifics of cases or deducing the outcomes of hypothetical situations from general principles given by authorities.

If that assumption is relaxed, however, and the subject of law school is lawyering, then the draft asserts that "lawyering," which is assumed to be about corporate control transactions for some reason, is pretty much the same everywhere because there are always term sheets and "data rooms," no matter what local regulations require.

I think none of that is true. So the "complex path" set forth here is a midway between a multidisciplinary education in understanding social process, active listening, mind reading and artistic creation on the one hand, and a bureaucratic, sterile, non-dialogic proclamation of the legal principles evolved in the system of large-scale commercial slavery we call the Roman Empire, on the other. These aren't "two systems"—they are fundamentally conflicting understandings of what it means to be a lawyer and to do lawyer-things, as well as to be a teacher or a student, and to do learning.

The primary task of the draft, from this point of view, is to dissociate these fundamental differences in order to print a bilingual business card. I recognize that these two outlooks are difficult to square. I think acting out the difficulty rather than ignoring it would be an even more important improvement. It might then be possible to decide which of the two law schools to drop out of. One of them is clearly inadequate.