Why Legal Reasoning has to be Unique
PDF

Keywords

law
legal
lawyers
reason
reasoning
thinking
inference
peculiarity
specific
features

How to Cite

Koszowski, M. (2017). Why Legal Reasoning has to be Unique. Przegląd Prawniczy Uniwersytetu Im. Adam Mickiewicza, 7, 325–342. https://doi.org/10.14746/ppuam.2017.7.20

Abstract

This article addresses the issue of the uniqueness of legal reasoning and, specifically, the author advances the thesis that what makes legal reasoning different from the reasoning  employed in demonstrative and empirical sciences and matters of everyday life is not the actual form (scheme) of this reasoning but the legal milieu. Thus, he tries to demonstrate that some features of law – such as its normative and prescriptive nature, difficulties with the verification of its content on empirical grounds, its limitations stemming from the physical world and dependence on humans and their minds, as well as the ‘unspecialized’ character of law agents and the extraordinary role of authority – influence legal reasoning as well. At the same time these features also allow this reasoning to be unique, despite its adoption of forms of inference that are present elsewhere.

https://doi.org/10.14746/ppuam.2017.7.20
PDF

References

Alexander L., Sherwin E., Demystifying Legal Reasoning, Cambridge 2008.

Alexy R., A Theory of Legal Argumentation: The Theory of Rational Discourse as Theory of Legal Justification, transl. R. Adler, N. MacCormick, Oxford 1989.

Burton S.J., An Introduction to Law and Legal Reasoning, Austin 2007.

Cardozo B.N., The Nature of the Judicial Process (With Notes), New Haven 2008.

Christie G.C., Law, Norms & Authority, London 1982.

Epstein S., Integration of the Cognitive and the Psychodynamic Unconscious, “American Psychologist” 1994, vol. 49.

Frank J., Law & Modern Mind: with a New Introduction by Brian H. Bix, New Brunswick 2009.

Gladwell M., Blink. The Power of Thinking without Thinking, London 2006.

Glöckner A., Ebert I.D., Legal intuition and expertise, in Handbook of Intuition Research, ed. M. Sinclair, Cheltenham 2011.

Guthrie Ch., Wistrich A.J., Rachlinski J.J., Judicial Intuition, http://law.vanderbilt.edu/files/archive/Judicial_Intuition.pdf [access: 11.12.2016].

Handbook of Intuition Research, ed. M. Sinclair, Cheltenham 2011.

Heuristics and Biases. The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment, ed. Th. Gilovich, D.W. Griffin, D. Kahneman, Cambridge 2002.

Holmes O.W., The Path of the Law, “Boston University Law Review” 1965, vol. 45.

Holyoak K.J., Thagard P., Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, Cambridge, MA 1996.

Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making, ed. H. Plessner, C. Betsch, T. Betsch, New York 2008.

Lamond G., Precedent and Analogy in Legal Reasoning, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006, http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/legal-reas-prec/ [access: 11.12.2016].

Levi E.H., The Nature of Judicial Reasoning, “The University of Chicago Law Review” 1965, vol. 32, no. 3.

Llewellyn K.N., The Bramble Bush. The Classic Lectures on the Law and Law School, New York 2008.

Llewellyn K.N., The Theory of Rules. Edited and with an Introduction by Frederic Schauer, Chicago 2011.

MacCormick N., Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory, Oxford 1978.

Peczenik A., On Law and Reason, Lund 2009.

Petrazycki L., Law and Morality: With a New Introduction by A. Javier Treviño, New Brunswick 2011.

Posner R.A., How Judges Think, Cambridge, MA 2008.

Popper K., The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London 2002.

Posner R.A., The Problems of Jurisprudence, Cambridge, MA 1990.

Radin M., Law as Logic and Experience, Clark 2012.

Schauer F., Playing by The Rules. A Philosophical Examination of Rule-Based Decision-Making in Law and in Life, Oxford 1991.

Schauer F., Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning, Cambridge, MA 2009.

Sunstein C.R., Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict, New York 1996.

Weinreb L.L., Legal Reason: The Use of Analogy in Legal Argument, Cambridge 2005.

Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics Cambridge, 1939: From the Notes of R.G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies, ed. C. Diamond, Chicago 1989.