It includes regulations
Atkinson 14, Greenspoon Marder LLP, Professor of Law, Florida State University. (Rob, Summer 2014, ARTICLE: An Elevation of Neo-Classical Professionalism in Law and Business, 12 Geo. J.L. & Pub. Pol'y 621, 661. Lexis accessed online via KU libraries)
To appreciate the conditions under which lawyers need this special hybrid knowledge, let's consider again our earlier car example, this time from the perspective of the lawyer representing the automobile manufacturer. As we saw in Part I, 118 the manufacturer may want to know whether a particular automobile design is, in a broad sense, "legal." Is it, for example, safe enough, or fuel efficient enough, or likely enough to return a reasonable profit relative to other corporate opportunities? For this the lawyer will have to know the law "on the books" from a wide range of sources: statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions. Some of these, as we have seen, incorporate the standards of other disciplines, at a fairly high level of technical refinement: emissions standards, cost-benefit analysis, perhaps even portfolio theory. This knowledge is clearly beyond the ken of the laity; it is, in sociological terms, specialized knowledge. 119 But why need the lawyer's practice link that technical knowledge of the law with knowledge acquired in a university-based, liberal arts education? 120