Statutory Law

A proficiency in understanding, applying, and even formulating statutes—the actual texts of laws enacted by legislative bodies—is a vital aspect of the practice of law, but statutory law is often given too little attention by law schools. Much of legal education, with its focus on judicial decisions and analysis of cases, can arriving at a speculative interpretation of the law relevant to the client's legal problem.

Lawyers discover fairly soon, however, that much of their practice does not depend on the kind of painstaking analysis of cases that is performed in law school. For example, a lawyer representing the owner of a business can often find an explicit answer as to what the client should do about a that the ability to interpret them accurately is an essential skill for law students to learn.

Another skill that teaching statutory law would improve is synthesis. Law professors work hard at developing their students' ability to analyze individual cases, but in so doing they favor the ability to apply the law in particular cases over the ability to understand the interrelations among laws. In contrast, the study of important because most students intend to specialize in a chosen area, or areas, of the law.

One possible argument against including training in statutory law as a standard part of law school curricula is that many statutes vary from region to region within a nation, so that the mastery of a set of statutes would usually not be generally applicable. There is some truth to this objection; law the study of statutory law an important undertaking even for law schools with a national orientation.