Legal Reasoning and Argumentation

This course provides a general introduction to the theory of legal practice. Whilst law school provides a good understanding of legal doctrine, legal practitioners often lack clear guidance on the broader philosophies underlying the profession, and in particular, the theoretical underpinnings of the core apects of how to argue as a lawyer. As such, this course is an introduction to both a ‘craft’ and a ‘philosophy’ that draws from research undertaken by the course instructors and close reading of academic texts on how to be a better lawyer in making legal arguments. These texts will be used to better understand how legal arguments are made in legal practice and how some arguments come to prevail over others.

The course is structured around principal legal theoretical categories (formalism and pragmatism) and their application within discrete fields of law (contract and private transactions, constitutional politics, human rights) and also addresses fundamental emerging issues on the role of science in adjudication and pursuing social issues through cause lawyering. The course does not focus on the law of a specific jurisdiction, but rather addresses cross-cutting issues which are common amongst contemporary legal systems, and ultimately, timeless lynchpins of lawyering skills. The first half of the course provides an introduction to the basic skills of lawyering, whilst the second half delves into cross cutting special topics.

Throughout the course, students will develop a solid understanding of the main argumentative ‘tools’ of contemporary lawyering – rhetorics, interpretation, reasoning, precedent, the law/fact distinction and concept formation – which they will further learn to implement through extensive class exercises and case work on both domestic and international legal cases. The assessment for this course will consist of student’s writing an individual written assignment in the form of a shadow plea or a shadow judgment, that addresses the theories underlying lawyering in practice. Students will be instructed to write both a formal (shadow) plea/judgment and to explicate how/why the chose the wording used in that exercise.

This course thus offers a good choice for those students who want to ‘master’ the art of lawyering by completing existing studies at the BA/Bachelor level on general introductions to law and legal philosophy. Students that take this course will be thus not only well equipped for making good legal arguments as a member of the legal profession, but will also gain a solid understanding of the theoretical construction of the social world to support academic legal research.