In a broader sense, teaching law to young children will provide them with a range of reasoning skills that are important in many areas of their lives. “Legal thinking” – which is not just obedience to rules – changes the way people approach difficult problems because it gives them tools to organize facts and values in order to arrive at a reasoned and actionable decision. As an added benefit, legal reasoning teaches students to consider the views of others and understand that there may be more than one side of an issue. The starting point for many legal considerations is an excellent understanding on the other side of any problem. By being exposed to different perspectives, people develop a sense of intellectual humility and honesty and become more open to other points of view. In general, people need to learn the rules of the game most often during the game. Rarely in life do people get a set of rules in advance on how to succeed at work or in a marriage. Analog reasoning skills help a person identify the right course of action by comparing situations as they experience them. Essentially, the field of law and in this area are perhaps the most practical practice of judicial decision-making exercises in practical argumentation.
Law certainly involves more than logic. Yet the myriad of factors that contribute to good advocacy and fair judgment suggest that the “life of the law,” while not just logical, is a variety of activities that all use and depend on reason in a specialized way. The precision of the details required in the preparation of contracts, wills, trusts and other legal documents is rational precision; The planning and due diligence strategy required of litigants to decide on the presentation of their cases is rational care; The ability to argue in writing and orally required for the practice of appeal is obviously a rational ability; the talent expected of administrative judges to draw factual and coherent conclusions from the law is rational talent; and the ability of trial and appellate judges to unabashedly and impartially separate the core of reasoning from rhetoric and emotion from adversarial presentation in order to render judgments warranted under the law is a rational capacity. Here, the court justifies its legal decision and helps other courts, lawyers and judges to use and comply with the judgment in subsequent proceedings. Therefore, the “Discussion or Analysis” section should be well reasoned and written. There are good reasons to remain skeptical of overly rationalistic representations of law and legal practice. The network of historical doctrine, legal principles and factual nuances that underlies each judicial decision is far too complicated to allow for critical evaluation using a single evaluation method, including the principles of logic. We are therefore rightly concerned when we recall the formalistic visions of nineteenth-century jurists — visions that found the essence of jurisprudence in the logical derivation of conclusions necessarily required by predetermined legal principles. Legal reasoning is a method of thinking and reasoning used by lawyers and judges when applying legal rules to certain interactions between legal entities. The legal justification in case of a court decision can be found in the “Discussion or analysis” section of the court`s decision.
Equally important is a second basic category of reasoning – deductive logic, especially deductive forms of argument known as “syllogisms.” These are the classic forms of the deductive argument, which consists of a primary premise, a secondary premise, and a conclusion. It is this aspect of logic that provoked such virulent opposition to formalism a century ago. And it is this aspect of logic that has been so poorly minimized during the twentieth century. Yet even a rudimentary understanding of deductive logic gives lawyers, judges, and law students a valuable tool in determining whether an argument in a legal opinion or letter is valid or misleading. There are fundamental elements that appear in the argumentation that need to be addressed: like many complex subjects, legal argumentation is rarely in black or white. Children and adolescents learn not only to apply a general rule to a situation, but also to think about how laws should be applied. For example, consider whether the “no motor vehicles in the fleet” rule applies to electric wheelchairs. Most of us can intuitively say that the answer is “no,” but we may lack vocabulary to explain why. After all, electric wheelchairs are motorized, and they are vehicles. Law is considered a discipline in which you are either an expert because you went to law school or completely ignorant because you did not. Of course, children and young people learn what rules they should follow – and they find out which laws they should protest against. However, this is not the kind of legal education that will produce engaged citizens.
Students should learn how the legal process works and the skills of legal reasoning, just as they learn other comprehension and reasoning skills in school. As an added benefit, people will be less inclined to fall into rhetorical arguments that trigger an emotional response without giving a clear idea of what should be done and how to do it effectively. Just as the scientific community is engaged in science education so that people can see valid arguments about vaccination and climate change, we hope that good legal education of students will reduce the prevalence of bad legal and political arguments that currently permeate social and political discourse. It is therefore interesting for law practitioners and students to have an understanding of the basic principles of logic that are regularly used in legal reasoning and judicial decision-making. This understanding requires, to a large extent, an ability to navigate through the processes of inductive reasoning – the methods of analogy and inductive generalization – through which conclusions are drawn on the basis of past experiences and empirical observations. The common law method for the development of jurisprudence, as well as the general prescript often referred to as the “rule of law” – according to which similar cases are decided in the same way – are logically based on inductive thinking. It is a means of extracting the decision from another court opinion or an existing constitutional or legislative provision and applying it in another case. The rule statement when using deductive reasoning is usually broad and not narrow.
This approach is mechanical and therefore only effective in ideal and often unsatisfactory situations. But it lies somewhere between strict formalistic jurisprudence and a utter disregard for logic and argumentative form, where law and legal practice truly find peace. Although all that is usually repeated by Justice Holmes` point of view is the succinct remark quoted above, his case law writings, as well as his legal opinions, make it clear that he never intended to suggest that logic is not a central aspect of law or judicial decision-making. He, along with legal realists and other critics of legal formalism, have probably recognized that evaluation and the creation of arguments are central to the lawyer`s art and judgment. The legal justification shows why and how the court, lawyer or judge arrived at his decision or reasoning in the case. Therefore, it is mandatory to address the elements mentioned in a clear and concise manner. This can be done using deductive or analytical reasoning. The above is an excerpt from Professor Douglas Lind`s book Logic and Legal Reasoning (2nd edition, The National Judicial College Press, 2007). Lind, who is a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Idaho in Moscow, as well as a lawyer, teaches the logical part of the NJC`s logic and opinion writing course. The logical part of the course is a two-day immersion in logic, where participants receive a foundation in deductive and inductive logic and the opportunity to discuss the use of logic in legal reasoning.
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