Law Commons^™

Teaching Reasoning, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Reasoning skills of a certain sort are taught well in the traditional law school curriculum. No matter how good her previous education, the typical law student surely acquires an improved facility at testing propositions by considering hypothetical applications. Many students learn a lot about linguistic indeterminacy, unintended consequences, the allocation of decision-making responsibility, and how much turns on which questions are asked and how they are framed. It is a rare, indeed obtuse, person who completes a legal education still temperamentally inclined to refute unwelcome ideas when distinguishing them will do.

Where legal education falls short, I think, is with …