Success in business and in life requires the development of critical thinking skills. Critical thinking requires the ability to understand what someone is saying and then to ask specific questions that enables you to evaluate the quality of the reasoning offered to support ideas, decisions and advice. Critical thinking enables you to weigh the relative worth of alternative courses of action. Critical thinking combined with ethical reasoning helps you make better choices and decisions. There is an eight step process that you can use to analyze the legal cases in this course. The process is as follows:

1. What are the facts?

2. What is the issue?

3. What are the reasons and conclusions?

4. What are the relevant rules of law?

5. Does the legal argument contain significant ambiguity?

6. What ethical norms are fundamental to the decision?

8. Is there relevant missing information?

The ethical norms that influence a judge's decisions are justice, stability, freedom, fairness and efficiency.

Utilizing the process above you by the judge, analyze the following fact pattern and decide who should win the case and why.

Smith and his adult son live in a house owned by Smith. At the request of the son, Brown painted the house. Smith did not authorize the work, but he knew Brown was painting the house and raised no objections. When Brown presented Smith with an invoice for the painting job, Smith refused to pay. Smith argued that he had not contracted to have the house painted. Brown brought a lawsuit against Smith to collect the reasonable value of the work he had done. There is a precedent that when a homeowner allows work to be done on his home by a person who would ordinarily expect to be paid, a duty to pay exists?