Synopses & Reviews
Legal Reason is written in accessible prose, with examples from law and from everyday life.
Review
'\"The author displays a rare ability to be concise and convincing, precise and gripping, ensuring that this book will serve as both a thought-provoking work to those familiar with legal thought and jurisprudence, and as an approachable book to legal novices.\" Harvard Law Review\"Weinreb has known where to put the spotlight on matters of criminal law and procedure, copywright, theories of natural law, environmental law and, in this case, pragmatic legal reasoning.\" The Law and Politics Book Review, Lief H. Carter, The Colorado College'
Review
"The author displays a rare ability to be concise and convincing, precise and gripping, ensuring that this book will serve as both a thought-provoking work to those familiar with legal thought and jurisprudence, and as an approachable book to legal novices." Harvard Law Review
Review
"Weinreb has known where to put the spotlight on matters of criminal law and procedure, copywright, theories of natural law, environmental law and, in this case, pragmatic legal reasoning." The Law and Politics Book Review, Lief H. Carter, The Colorado College
Synopsis
Legal Reason describes and explains the process of analogical reasoning, which is the distinctive feature of legal argument. It challenges the prevailing view, which regards analogical reasoning as logically flawed or as a defective form of deductive reasoning. It shows that analogical reasoning in the law is the same as the reasoning used by all of us routinely in everyday life and that it is a valid form of reasoning derived from the innate human capacity to recognize the general in the particular, on which thought itself depends.
About the Author
Lloyd L. Weinreb is a Dane Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Natural Law and Justice and Oedipus at Fenway Park: What Rights Are and Why There Are Any.
Table of Contents
Preface; Introduction; 1. Analogical and inductive and deductive reasoning; 2. Steamboats, broadcast transmissions, and electronic eavesdropping; 3. Analogical legal reasoning; 4. Analogical reasoning, legal education, and the law; Appendix A: note on analogical reasoning; Appendix B: biographical notes; Notes; Index.