Legal Reasoning

Legal systems that derive from the English system depend onprecedent. This means that they subscribe to the requirement that similar legal cases must be decided similarly. Consequently, analogical reasoning figures prominently in legal argument because such arguments frequently involve conclusions about a case at trial that are based on a comparison with some preceding case that has already been decided by the courts. For this reason, the factors that bear on evaluating the strength of ordinary analogical arguments can also be applied to legal arguments.

Besides the role of precedent just described, another reason that analogical reasoning plays a key role in legal argument has to do with how laws come about in these systems. Today, many of our laws are the direct product of decree by some legislative body. These laws are calledstatutes, and they are typically written in relatively general language. Consequently, precedent is often required to determine how these general statutes should be interpreted and applied.

Finally, it is worth noting some caveats (qualifications) about the way precedent and analogical reasoning factor in legal argument. First of all, court systems include a variety of jurisdictions (for example, federal courts versus state courts in the United States) and, as a result, a precedent may carry different weight in different jurisdictions. Thus, as primary analogues for a legal argument, the relevance of a particular precedent may vary depending on the court before which the argument is made. Also, the modes of similarity that link these analogues are often the result of creative thinking by lawyers and judges, and the relevance of these similarities to the proposed conclusion is often debatable. Furthermore, sometimes a court is confronted with cases for which there is no clear precedent. Such cases are called "cases of first impression," and these cases must be decided on the basis of something other than simple legal precedent. (Judges often resort to moral reasoning in these cases.)

Exercise:

Which statement best explains why cases of first impression often involve more creativity than does the attempt to deal with ordinary legal cases?

A) Cases of first impression typically involve many cases of clear precedent.

B) Judges and lawyers must often resort to extralegal means of comparison when dealing with cases of first impression.

C) There is a long history of legal precedent available to court systems that rely on precedent.

D) In ordinary legal cases, the relevance of a particular precedent to the proposed conclusion is not debatable.

Answer?