Advanced Introduction to Legal Reasoning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Alexander ◽  
◽  
Emily Sherwin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Comprehensive Overview ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
Empirical Reasoning ◽  
Canonical Texts

This insightful and highly readable Advanced Introduction provides a succinct, yet comprehensive, overview of legal reasoning, covering both reasoning from canonical texts and legal decision-making in the absence of rules. Overall, it argues that there are only two methods by which judges decide legal disputes: deductive reasoning from rules and unconstrained moral, practical, and empirical reasoning.

Balancing, Subsumption, and the Constraining Role of Legal Text

2010 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederick Schauer
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Legal Argumentation ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Jürgen Habermas ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
External Constraint ◽  
Canonical Texts

Robert Alexy has for many years been a prominent analyst of the role of principles in legal argumentation, and an equally prominent defender of the rationality of balancing and proportionality modes of legal decision-making. But although Alexy's defense of proportionality and balancing against charges by Jürgen Habermas and Justice Antonin Scalia that balancing is essentially an irrational process is sound, Alexy in the process is too quick to collapse the important differences between the process of balancing competing principles and the process of interpreting a canonical written text. Although both can be and are frequently rational, rationality is not the same as external constraint, and the ability of canonical texts to provide a degree of external constraint on legal decision-making that cannot be provided by open-ended principles is a difference that should not be lost in the well-aimed efforts to demonstrate that both can be rational and both have important places in legal argumentation and decision-making.

Law as an Autonomous Discipline

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian H. Bix
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Legal Doctrine ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Legal Decision Making

This article considers claims about the ‘autonomy of law’. These are that that legal reasoning is different from other forms of reasoning; that legal decision-making is different from other forms of decision-making; that legal reasoning and decision-making are sufficient to themselves, that they neither need help from other approaches nor would they be significantly improved by such help; and that legal scholarship should be about distinctively legal topics (often referred to as ‘legal doctrine’) and is not or should not be about other topics.

scholarly journals Judicial Notice: The Very Texture of Legal Reasoning

2000 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Susan G. Drummond
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Family Law ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
History Of

AbstractThe doctrine of judicial notice has been gaining attention in Canadian jurisprudence. This article begins with an examination of how the doctrine has been recently used in areas such as family law to bring a diversity of community interests into the legal decision-making process. The history of the doctrine in American and Canadian jurisprudence is reviewed along with its principal characterizations in the works of Thayer, Morgan, and Davis. The article goes on to uncover several epistemological problems to which the doctrine is prone and proposes a means of getting out of these philosophical dilemmas while keeping the integrity of the doctrine intact. The article concludes by alluding to the communitarian uses to which the doctrine might be put.

Stereotypes and legal decision making

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
John G. Conway ◽  
Scott R. Tindale
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Legal Decision Making

Psychology and the New Private Law

2020 ◽  
pp. 124-142
Author(s):  
Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Law And Economics ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Private Law ◽  
Legal Decision ◽  
Psychological Analysis ◽  
Legal Decision Making ◽  
Normative Models

This chapter presents a framework for understanding the most promising contributions of psychological methods and insights for private law. It focuses on two related domains of psychological research: cognitive and social psychology. Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes, which one might shorthand as “thinking.” Social psychology asks about the role of other people—actual, implied, or imagined—on mental states and human behavior. The chapter is oriented around five core psychological insights: calculation, motivation, emotion, social influence, and moral values. Legal scholarship by turns tries to explain legal decision-making, tries to calibrate incentives, and tries to justify its values and its means. Psychology speaks to these descriptive, prescriptive, and normative models of decision-making. The chapter then argues that psychological analysis of legal decision-making challenges the work that the idea of choice and preference is doing in private law, especially in the wake of the law and economics movement.

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