Obama as Chicago Law Professor

This, from the big NYT article on Obama's time as a Chicago law professor, is encouraging:

[A]s a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next.

The policy prescriptions of a lot of lawyers-turned-politicians are excessively legalistic, and therefore hopelessly ineffective: add a legal presumption here, tweak a burden of proof there, and presto!—the problem is fixed. It's good to hear that Obama doesn't think like that, and that he didn't think like that even when he was a law professor.