Law Commons^™

This presentation describes an empirical study that asks whether lawyers and judges use legal analogy on a day-to-day basis in a manner that reflects normative standards of reasonableness and rationality. From a theoretical perspective legal philosophers deny, transform, or mystify legal analogy, but lawyers and judges use it every day without comment. The question is important because we expect lawyers and judges use legal analogy thousands of times per day and law schools teach it as a basic skill. The argumentation schemes of informal logic supply a theoretical framework in the form of an argumentation scheme, but we do not …

As academic disciplines mature, professors with specialized interests within their field often gravitate toward each other to pursue their interests collectively. Eventually, members of a group might find themselves collaborating on presentations, articles, or similar endeavors, with the goal of advancing an academic specialty.

To our knowledge, however, few such groups appear to exist in the LRW community (notable exceptions: applied legal storytelling; LWI’s Discipline-Building Working Group’s bibliography program). Our presentation hopes to model how LRW professors can come together to explore a single aspect of the legal writing field. We’ll discuss how we brought together over two dozen professors …