Methods of Legal Reasoning describes and criticizes four methods used in legal practice, legal dogmatics and legal theory: logic, analysis, argumentation and hermeneutics. The book takes the unusual approach of discussing in a single study four different, sometimes competing concepts of legal method. Sketched this way, the panorama allows the reader to reflect deeply on questions concerning the methodological conditioning of legal science and the existence of a unique, specific legal method.
Language skills,study skills, argument skills and legal knowledge are vital to every law student, professional lawyer and academic. Legal Method Reasoning offers a range of 'how to' techniques for acquiring these skills. It shows how to handle and use legal texts, how to read and write about the law, how to acquire disciplined study techniques and how to construct legal arguments. This new edition will be of value to both undergraduate and postgraduate law students.
Language skills, study skills, argument skills and legal knowledge are vital to every law student, professional lawyer and academic. Legal Method, Skills and Reasoning suggests a range of 'how-to' techniques for perfecting these academic and practical skills. It explains how to work with legal texts; how to read and write about the law; how to acquire effective disciplined study techniques; and how to construct legal arguments. Packed full of practical examples and diagrams across the range of legal skills from language and research skills to mooting and negotiation, this edition will be invaluable to law students seeking to acquire a deeper understanding of how to apply each discreet legal skill effectively. This restructured third edition is now additionally supported by a Companion Website offering a wealth of additional resources for individual and group work for both students and lecturers. For students, the Companion Website offers: workbooks for each part, containing guided practical and reflective tasks a series of ‘how-to’ exercises, which help to provide real-life legal skills examples and practice guidance on answering legal problem and essay-style questions self-test quizzes to consolidate learning for each individual legal skill. For lecturers, the Companion Website hosts: a set of PowerPoint slides of the diagrams in the text specimen seminar plans, with supplementary notes to provide support and inspiration for teaching legal skills sample legal skills assessment, and accompanying answers.
This text provides real-world case files designed to reinforce foundational legal reasoning skills. Students work through practical problems, each of which is set in the context of a different basic law school subject. Commentary throughout the text guides students toward more sophisticated comprehension of the factual and legal materials, and more nuanced legal analysis, all while introducing common forms of practice-based writing. Each chapter then takes the rules introduced in the case file and illustrates ways they might be applied to an essay examination question and multiple-choice question. Additional practice questions and suggestions for classroom exercises are included in the extensive accompanying teacher's manual.
The Five Types of Legal Argument succeeds both as a work of legal theory and as a practical guide to legal reasoning for law students, lawyers, and judges. Huhn introduces each concept separately, and from many parts Huhn develops an intricate and nuanced theory of what law is. Huhn also shows readers how to identify, create, attack, and evaluate the five types of legal arguments (text, intent, precedent, tradition, and policy) and how to weave the different types of arguments together to make them more persuasive. The Second Edition of this book further develops both the theoretical and practical themes of the work. In this edition Huhn introduces two additional ways of attacking legal arguments, and in a new chapter he utilizes principles of deductive logic to demonstrate the validity of the theory of the five types of legal arguments. The principal strength of this book is its clarity. The book is written in plain language that is easily understood both by lay persons and professionals, and it is organized simply and logically. Reviewers and legal scholars have described the book as "fascinating" and "masterful." The Five Types of Legal Argument is required reading at a number of leading American law schools, and it is recommended for anyone who wishes to understand how to construct and how to critique legal arguments. "I found The Five Types of Legal Argument to be invaluable because it succinctly breaks down legal analysis. At first, reading judicial opinions, especially with majority and dissenting opinions, can be a dizzying experience. But when you break down the arguments you learn to spot appeals to different types of reasoning. The reward is two-fold: First, you can more easily understand judicial opinions and can criticize or appreciate them on a more sophisticated level. Second, the five types of legal arguments become a checklist of tools that you can invoke to make persuasive legal arguments of your own." Bryce Landier, former law student "The Five Types of Legal Argument contains two of the top three most valuable pages that I have read during my time in law school." Whit Pierce, law student "The Five Types of Legal Argument will help you shift the way you read from simply understanding and memorizing legal texts to critically analyzing and interpreting the text and the arguments made within the text. I wish I read this book during my 1L year." Kathleen Rose, law student "This book will help you read, it will help you write, and it will help you think clearly about the arguments that are made in legal discourse." Jonathan Williams, law student "In law school, professors always tell us not to focus on the trees, but to step back and see the forest when analyzing legal issues. This book certainly furthers that well-reasoned approach." Amanda Johnson, law student "The book serve[s] as a fine introduction to legal analysis and indicate to students the importance of identifying the categories of legal argument they encounter." Ben Wiles, law student
The Palgrave Macmillan Law Masters series is a long-running and successful list of titles offering clear, concise and authoritative guides to the main subject areas, written by experienced and respected authors. This ninth edition of Legal Method provides a lively introduction to the nature of the English legal system and its sources, and to the techniques which lawyers use when handling those sources. The text assumes no prior knowledge and makes its content accessible by clarity of expression rather than by dilution of content. In addition to more conventional sources, writers as varied as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and T. S. Eliot are cited. This is an ideal course companion for both law undergraduate and GDL/CPE students. Includes end of chapter summaries and self-test exercises.
The competent study of law is a finely tuned balance of excellent language ability, good reading and writing skills, good personal study discipline, a thorough appreciation of the relevant areas of substantive law and excellent argumentative skills. Legal method is an important area of study for two main reasons. First, it is important for the range of techniques that it can offer to break into legal texts, both primary and secondary. Secondly, it exposes reasoning processes concerned with the theory and practise of law. The book deals in both the areas mentioned, and aims to deal with issues of.
‘Rethinking’ legal reasoning seems a bold aim given the large amount of literature devoted to this topic. In this thought-provoking book, Geoffrey Samuel proposes a different way of approaching legal reasoning by examining the topic through the context of legal knowledge (epistemology). What is it to have knowledge of legal reasoning?
This updated casebook serves a course in introduction to legal reasoning. It is designed to initiate students in the legal methods of case law analysis and statutory interpretation. In a course of this kind, students should acquire or refine the techniques of close reading, analogizing, distinguishing, positing related fact patterns, and criticizing judicial and legislative exposition and logic. Law students' introduction to law can be unsettling: the sink or swim approach favored by many schools casts students adrift in a sea of substantive rules, forms and methods. By contrast, the Legal Methods course seeks to acquaint students with their new rhetorical and logical surroundings before, or together with, the students' first encounters with the substance of contracts, torts, or other first year courses. This approach may not only be user friendly; it should also prompt students to take a critical distance from the wielding of the methods. In this way, students may avoid (or at least broaden) the tunnel vision that so often afflicts beginning law students. The fifth edition features a substantially revised chapter on statutory interpretation. It not only highlights recent Supreme Court decisions, but also confronts students with statutory texts to construe independently of judicial exposition. The chapter also includes new sections on ordinary meaning, the use of dictionaries and corpus linguistics, and temporal problems in statutory interpretation.
This handbook addresses legal reasoning and argumentation from a logical, philosophical and legal perspective. The main forms of legal reasoning and argumentation are covered in an exhaustive and critical fashion, and are analysed in connection with more general types (and problems) of reasoning. Accordingly, the subject matter of the handbook divides in three parts. The first one introduces and discusses the basic concepts of practical reasoning. The second one discusses the general structures and procedures of reasoning and argumentation that are relevant to legal discourse. The third one looks at their instantiations and developments of these aspects of argumentation as they are put to work in the law, in different areas and applications of legal reasoning.
