Legal eagles.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills

The Knight Foundation has pulled the plug on a program that gave journalists a year at Yale Law School. The idea was that the rigor of law school would be intellectually stimulating for the reporters who also would be better prepared to cover legal issues. Linda Greenhouse, who covers the Supreme Court for The New York Times, was one of the participants.

I think the Knight Foundation made a serious error in halting the program. In my 32 years of working with bright young journalists, I found their greatest defect to be a lack of sense of where the holes were in the cases they were making in their articles. The best way to...