Legal Philosophy and the Study of Legal Reasoning

Abstract

In this short paper, I shall argue that legal philosophers ought to focus more than they have done so far on problems of legal reasoning. Not only is this a field with many philosophically interesting questions to consider, but it is also, in my estimation, the field in which legal philosophers can contribute the most to both the practice and the study of law. The practice of law is, after all, an argumentative practice. Lawyers and judges aim to provide solutions to concrete legal problems but rarely try to say anything of general application. And although legal scholars take a more general view of things and typically discuss types of legal problems, they, too, tend to prefer a rather piecemeal approach to legal problem-solving, and usually abstain from defending general theories or otherwise speaking in general terms. But even though reasoning and interpretation are at the center of what legal practitioners and legal scholars do, and even though there are many highly talented persons in the above-mentioned groups, neither legal practitioners nor legal scholars reason with the same care and precision as philosophers do. Perhaps the most important difference is that whereas legal practitioners and legal scholars typically approach reasoning and interpretation in an intuitive way, emphasizing rules of thumb, common sense, and the value of workable legal solutions to problematic cases, philosophers, although they may also reason intuitively and emphasize common sense, often take care to make the logical structure of the relevant argument explicit by formulating as precisely as possible both the conclusion and the premises, and by subjecting the argument thus formulated to close logical as well as substantive scrutiny, where such scrutiny typically involves paying close attention to the content, structure, and function of any relevant concepts. Against this background, I consider the following three types of questions regarding legal reasoning especially worthy of serious consideration. The first question is that of the relevance of the theory of reasons holism to legal reasoning in general. The second is the question of how to analyze (first-order) legal statements in a way that does not undermine the rationality of legal reasoning. And the third is the question of whether legal arguments or inferences are to be understood as deductive or as inductive inferences, or both, and if so how.