Law Commons^™

Metaphor And Analogy: The Sun And Moon Of Legal Persuasion, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

Drawing on recent studies of social cognition, decision making, and analogical processing, this article recommends that lawyers turn to novel characterizations and metaphors to solve a particular kind of persuasion problem that is created by the way judges and juries think and decide. According to social cognition researchers, we perceive and interpret new information by following a process of schematic cognition, analogizing the new data we encounter to the knowledge structures embedded in our memories. Decision-making researchers differentiate between intuitive and reflective processes (System 1 and System 2), and they agree that in System 1 decision making, only the most …

Perelman's Theory Of Argumentation And Natural Law, Francis J. Mootz Iii

Scholarly Works

Chaim Perelman resuscitated the rhetorical tradition by developing an elegant and detailed theory of argumentation. Rejecting the single-minded Cartesian focus on rational truth, Perelman recovered the ancient wisdom that we can argue reasonably about matters that admit only of probability. From this one would conclude that Perelman’s argumentation theory is inalterably opposed to natural law, and therefore that I would have done better to have written an article titled “Perelman’s Th eory of Argumentation as a Rejection of Natural Law.”

However, my thesis is precisely that Perelman’s theory of argumentation connects to the natural law tradition in interesting and productive …