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Logic Ab Initio: A Functional Approach to Improve Law Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

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While certainly not suggesting that formal logic training would remedy all that ails legal education or even that it could enhance critical thinking for all students, this article asserts that law schools should make the process of legal reasoning more transparent and explicit from the outset, and proposes techniques that can be adopted quickly with minimal institutional costs or upheaval. Part I examines possible reasons that law-school matriculants increasingly lack critical-thinking skills needed for success. Part II maps out three basic components of informal logic training: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and fallacy. It then identifies related law-school competencies that could be enhanced through training in these areas. Part III proposes a relatively painless method of incorporating functional logic training across the law-school curriculum. Given the breadth and depth of the critical thinking deficit, this approach presents a pragmatic—though admittedly imperfect—solution to the problem.

“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” ― C.S. Lewis , The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Law professors and legal employers alike lament a modern trend of diminishing critical-thinking skills among law students and new graduates. [1] These concerns are not imaginary: a recent study that followed thousands of undergraduates through college concluded that large proportions of college graduates lacked critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication skills once thought to be the foundation of university education. [2] This means that law schools are increasingly enrolling students who lack the skill set traditionally associated with law-school success. [3] To complicate matters, this critical-thinking crisis comes at a time when law schools face stricter and more detailed accreditation standards than ever before. [4]

The concept of “critical thinking” has many overlapping definitions. [5] It’s been described as an “intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, [] or evaluating information.” [6] In cognitive terms, critical thinking is “problem solving in situations where ‘solutions’ cannot be verified empirically.” [7] In the specific context of legal education, critical thinking can be broadly described as “questioning knowledge.” [8] It requires students to remember, understand, and apply both law and facts, and then analyze, evaluate, and integrate that knowledge to determine “what is important, what is missing, and what is vague.” [9] In this respect, critical thinking is the “foundation for the ‘key intellectual tasks’ associated with the sophisticated higher order thinking required in law school.” [10]

We are all born with the ability to think, but critical thinking generally requires considerable training and hard work. [11] The ancient philosophers excelled at critical thinking because most formal learning involved—to a greater or lesser extent—the mastery of logic. [12] Classical philosophers like Aristotle practiced “formal” logic, so named because of its emphasis on the “form,” or structure, of the argument. [13] To formal logicians, whether the substance of an argument was true or false was unimportant. Their focus was on the argument’s logical structure and whether the form itself was reliable. [14] Those ancient philosophers spent considerable time thinking about how they were thinking and, were, perhaps, the first true metacognitive [15] thinkers.

But formal logic was and remains a discipline requiring rigorous training—an impractical detour on the path to critical thinking in law school. Therefore, requiring a course in formal logic in law school is much like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut: the benefit is outweighed by the collateral damage. What’s needed is a practical method harnessing the metacognitive benefits of logic that fits unobtrusively into existing law-school curricula. By introducing informal or “functional” logic into the curriculum, law schools can not only enhance students’ comprehension of individual lessons, but make them better overall thinkers.

The late Judge Ruggero Aldisert was an outspoken proponent of teaching logic to law students. In 1989, he published Logic for Lawyers: A Guide to Clear Legal Thinking , [16] a text that cogently explained that the basics of legal reasoning, including the use of precedent, are merely variations of deductive and inductive reasoning—the building blocks of logic. Logic for Lawyers coincided with a late-20 th and early-21 st century burst of legal scholarship exploring the relationship between law and classical logic and rhetoric. [17] In 2007, Judge Aldisert published the article Logic for Law Students: How to Think Like a Lawyer , [18] a more streamlined version of his earlier work, “explain[ing], in broad strokes, the core principles of logic and how they apply in the law-school classroom.” [19]

This article builds on Judge Aldisert’s premise that “thinking like a lawyer”—critical thinking—means “employing logic to construct arguments.” [20] It goes a step further, however, proposing that training law students to use logic would not only provide professors and students a common language to identify specific deficiencies in analysis, it could actually increase students’ cognitive capacity for critical thinking.

While certainly not suggesting that such training would remedy all that ails legal education or even that it could enhance critical thinking for all students, this article asserts that law schools should make the process of legal reasoning more transparent and explicit from the outset, and proposes techniques that can be adopted quickly with minimal institutional costs or upheaval. Part I examines possible reasons that law-school matriculants increasingly lack critical-thinking skills needed for success. Part II maps out three basic components of informal logic training: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and fallacy. It then identifies related law-school competencies that could be enhanced through training in these areas. Part III proposes a relatively painless method of incorporating functional logic training across the law-school curriculum. Given the breadth and depth of the critical thinking deficit (detailed below), this approach presents a pragmatic—though admittedly imperfect—solution to the problem.

Part I: A Lack Of Critical-Thinking Skills And (Some) Reasons For It

Success in law school (as opposed to success in most undergraduate disciplines) requires skills beyond mastery of facts, dates, formulas, and established theories and positions of academics. It requires independent reasoning. [21] And that reasoning cannot be theoretical or abstract: it must comport with societal norms of justice, fairness, and overall propriety. [22] Furthermore, that reasoning must be drawn from—and remain consistent with—numerous sources of law. Legal reasoning must be sound and valid; in other words, it must be logical. But increasingly, students come to law school ill-equipped for this type of rigor. [23] In recent years, law student credentials have decreased across the board: between 2010 and 2013, the median score of the Law School Admission Test (“LSAT”), which purports to measure critical-thinking skills, declined from 157 to 155. [24] In fact, nearly ninety percent of law schools had a lower median LSAT score in 2013 than in 2010. [25]

As to the cause, there is no shortage of finger pointing. Professor Jay Sterling Silver has opined that primary education—often undertaken in overcrowded public schools, where learning is geared toward mastery of standardized tests—teaches students not to think. [26] Professors Susan Stuart and Ruth Vance blame federal law, specifically noting that the current generation of law-school matriculants has been almost wholly educated under No Child Left Behind, which, since enactment in 2001, has shifted primary education focus towards mandatory achievement of minimum skill. [27] Others point to systematic grade inflation at the undergraduate level as contributing to students’ inflated opinion of their competency. [28] Still others suggest that institutional use of student evaluations as part of tenure decisions contributes to lower teaching standards. [29] Moreover, there appears to be no end in sight to the decline, given educational, social, and technological trends.

It’s likely impossible to identify the contributing factors exhaustively. But, as explained below, trends in undergraduate education and technology partly explain why students generally seem to have adopted a more shallow, heuristic method of thinking. This is particularly true of the Millennial generation, whose unique cultural characteristics make them all the more prone to such thinking shortcuts.

a. The Changing Nature of Undergraduate Education

Undergraduate education has changed over the last fifty years. [30] Some scholars theorize that modern law students lack adequate thinking skills partly because undergraduates no longer receive the benefit of a classical liberal-arts education. [31] A foundation in the liberal arts was long presumed to prepare students “to become civic and professional leaders, to prepare them for lifelong learning and inquiry.” [32] These students were well versed in the humanities, logic, and rhetoric, and developed “communication skills through a variety of oral and written exercises.” [33] This liberal education, focused on flexibility, creativity, critical thinking, analysis, and written communication, [34] would, unsurprisingly, prepare a college graduate to successfully participate in and benefit from the rigors of a law-school classroom. [35]

But while classic liberal-arts education did indeed mold creative and well-rounded learners for many decades, colleges and universities—along with students and their parents—have, over time, become increasingly dubious of its practical value. Knowledge of classical literature, arts, and natural sciences does not provide specific, marketable competencies for a defined entry-level job. [36] Some presume that a broad, liberal-arts education is unlikely to lead to the same level of monetary reward as, for example, a Master’s degree in Business Administration [37] or Engineering. [38] As a result, undergraduate institutions in the United States have, since the 1970s, shifted curricular emphasis from liberal arts to more professionally-oriented or vocational training. [39]

Colleges and universities now promise to prepare students for specific careers. But a classic liberal-arts program used classic literature, history, the arts, and natural sciences (as opposed to applied sciences) to shape thinkers who could, presumably, succeed in any number of careers. “The essential paradox, or one might even say the miracle of liberal education, is that by being evidently impractical, it equips a student for life far more richly and completely, and across a far wider expanse of time and space, than does education whose sole aim is to be useful.” [40]

Whether caused by an institutional shift away from liberal arts or some other phenomenon, the decrease in critical-thinking skills in undergraduates is well documented. In 2011, two researchers, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, collected empirical evidence of a downward trend in critical-thinking skills in undergraduates. Their book, Academically Adrift , proposed that undergraduates are overwhelmingly distracted by work, social lives, and an educational culture that puts learning low on the priority list. [41] Arum and Roksa collected data using the Collegiate Learning Assessment (“CLA”), a test comparing similarly situated students from a wide variety of colleges and universities. [42] The test measured critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing skills, all of which are essential during the first year of law school. [43] The study tracked the academic progress of 2,322 students, scoring them once in their first semester of college and again at the end of their fourth semester (half-way through college). The study found that forty-five percent of students gained virtually no critical thinking, complex reasoning, or writing skills over the assessment period:

While these students may have developed subject-specific skills . . . , in terms of general analytical competencies assessed, large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master. [44]

Other studies have painted an equally grim picture of college graduates’ critical-thinking skills. The Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, [45] conducted in 2006-2007, concluded that thirty percent of undergraduates tested showed no growth—or even declined—in critical-thinking skills after completing four years of college. [46] These results confirmed those of earlier studies, which also suggested a long-term decline in skills acquisition among undergraduates. [47]

Arum & Roksa’s study revealed another disturbing problem: universities participating in the assessment were not closing the achievement gap experienced by socioeconomically disadvantaged students. [48] In the initial, freshman-year CLA assessments, minorities and students from less-educated families scored significantly lower in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing than white students from more-educated families. [49] According to the study, this “achievement gap” between privileged students and their less-advantaged peers only increased after the first year of college. In other words, “[t]he results of the CLA ‘suggest higher education . . . reproduces social inequality,’” [50] insofar as it correlates to lack of critical thinking skills. Accordingly, the critical thinking necessary for law school is likely foreign to students who lack that privilege. [51] Law schools that purport to promote diversity and equal opportunity in learning simply cannot ignore such data.

The effect of this achievement gap is brought into sharper focus by the recent, colossal downturn in law-school applications. Higher-tier schools made up for the deficit in applications by accepting students they previously would never have considered. [52] Those students were effectively pilfered from middle-tier schools, which made up for their own losses by accepting students who they, in turn, would previously have rejected. [53] But this left many lower-tier schools, particularly those created to provide opportunities for minorities or other at-risk students, with an existential crisis: disappear, or continue the valuable mission with less-qualified and, presumably, less-prepared students. At the end of the day, nearly every law school has been left with a student cohort less likely than previous ones to pass the bar exam. [54]

The ostensible decrease in critical thinking in college graduates across socioeconomic spectrums impacts more than just individual students. A first-year law student who has never had the opportunity to disagree with a professor or to independently form opinions about cultures based on their art, literature, or music will almost certainly struggle to synthesize seemingly inconsistent judicial opinions into a cogent legal principle. But a critical mass of students struggling on the same level will fundamentally change the dynamic of a law-school classroom and prevent the purposeful exchange of ideas.

b. The Effect of Technology on Students’ Ability to Think

The effect of the digital age and the ubiquity of technology in nearly every detail of daily life cannot be understated when considering the reasons for waning critical thinking. “The Internet has made so much information available to us, more than we could possibly retain in our brains, that we are more often ‘handing off the job of remembering’ things to technology.” [55] But technology causes problems more worrisome than just intellectual laziness: technology is changing the way students learn.

Learning can be described as any “relatively permanent change in a neuron.” [56] Neurons are simply the brain’s cells which, when activated, release chemicals called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters connect neurons to other neurons, creating electrochemical pathways in the brain that form our thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensations. [57] When confronted with challenges, the human brain adapts by modifying existing neural connections. [58] This is known as brain plasticity or neuroplasticity. The brain can “efficiently reorganize allocation of its resources to meet demands and compensate for deficits.” [59] “Evolution has given us a brain that can literally change its mind—over and over again.” [60] This means humans “can form bad neurological habits as well as good ones.” [61]

In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains , author Nicholas Carr describes the subtle—yet ultimately profound—effects the Internet and other technological advances are having on human brains. Just as we can strengthen our mental capabilities through use of technology, Carr explains that human brains are subject to “intellectual decay.” [62] His collected research suggests that information and communication technologies are changing humans at a neurological level. [63]

For example, Carr posits that the Internet has supplanted reading as the primary source of information gathering (as did television, to some extent, before it). In terms of neurological development, the emergence of reading—particularly the “deep reading” necessary to consume literature and other book-length works—rewired and optimized the human brain for “deep thinking.” [64] The ability to read not only expanded one’s knowledge; it allowed previously unattainable levels of comparison to thoughts and experiences of others. [65] To fully appreciate the written word, one would have to discipline one’s mind to “follow a line of argument or narrative through a succession of printed pages.” [66]

The Internet, in contrast, features small chunks of information punctuated with distracting hyperlinks, multimedia, and ads. These features activate the prefrontal cortex, overtaxing the brain, making online reading a “cognitively strenuous act.” [67] In response to this stress, Carr suggests, our brains’ plasticity kicks in, rewiring and optimizing neural connections (and pruning unnecessary ones) for this new, rapid method of information gathering. [68] His research shows that as little as five hours of Internet use can significantly rewire the neural circuitry of the prefrontal cortex. [69]

The triumph of the Internet as a single medium for communication and information gathering may, therefore, also be its greatest danger. Just as computers have evolved to function simultaneously as typewriters, encyclopedias, phones, televisions, and social gathering spaces, their users have, unsurprisingly, become skillful multi-taskers. [70] And the same plasticity that, over millennia, had optimized our brains for deep thinking is now strengthening the neural circuitry customized for “rapid and incisive spurts of directed attention” that enable multitasking. [71] Unfortunately, quick shifts of attention and multitasking are quite useless in a typical 1L classroom. The reasoned analysis necessary in law school is not achievable without focused attention for a sustained time period. [72] Thus, critical thinking takes another hit thanks to technology.

One last insult to critical thinking occurs as a result of “The Google Effect.” [73] This phenomenon describes the automatic forgetting of information that can be found online. [74] Neuropsychologists know that, to maintain efficiency, our brains constantly—and subconsciously–prune memories. [75] Since there is less need to preserve information that can be readily retrieved, facts and ideas are more often pruned when the brain perceives that the information will be archived. [76] For law students faced with hundred-page reading assignments and looming deadlines, this phenomenon would appear rational and advantageous. Sometimes, “the effort needed to acquire knowledge outweighs the advantage of having it.” [77] The Google Effect could, therefore, be further eroding law students’ capacity for successful legal analysis. For example, a student accustomed to efficient and fruitful Internet searches will have little success using those techniques to brief a case before class. In the context of legal research, the wide-cast net of a Google search will yield poor results in comparison to a systematic, linear exploration of legal sources made possible by understanding jurisdictional structure. [78] Rule-based subjects, such as Civil Procedure and Evidence, which require memorization of rules as building-blocks of greater concepts, [79] could be challenging for a student whose brain is unaccustomed to storing large amounts of data. As technology rapidly pushes aside millennia of neurological refinements allowing for deep thinking and logical reasoning, legal education will likely have to adapt.

c. Millennial Zeitgeist and Beyond

Shifts in undergraduate education and technology may indeed be the two main ingredients for the collective deficits in critical-thinking skills of matriculating law students. But the culture and attitudes of the 21 st Century could be the seasoning that makes those deficits so unpalatable in the context of law-school learning. It’s all too easy to blast the Millennial generation [80] for its (real or imagined) lack of intellectualism, [81] perfunctory knowledge of history, [82] or narcissism. [83] But Millennials are also more socially conscious and idealistic than previous generations. [84] Their early exposure to computers and the Internet make them “the most technologically savvy and resourceful generation yet to hit the law school scene.” [85] They are “education-oriented, career-minded, motivated, connected, and self-confident.” [86] These same characteristics have led some scholars to brand Millennials as overconfident and entitled. [87]

In the context of legal education, overconfidence should be distinguished from confidence. Students who matriculate to law school have generally achieved much: They have completed a Bachelor’s degree—at least—with enough success to be accepted into a graduate-level program. [88] They have succeeded on the LSAT to the extent that their scores have earned them a place in an entering law-school class. Non-traditional students entering law school as a second or third career may have already achieved business success. As a result of this widely varied success, many students come to law school overestimating their intellectual abilities. [89] Often, students “express high academic expectations and professional ambitions but fail to realistically appreciate the necessary steps to achieve their goals.” [90]

This pattern is consistent with a fascinating psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The Dunning-Kruger Effect [91] was proposed in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, cognitive psychologists at Cornell University. Their study concluded that unskilled people generally hold overly favorable views of their intellectual abilities. This overestimation of ability increases as actual ability decreases. In other words, incompetence “robs [the incompetent] of the metacognitive ability to realize” they are incompetent: [92]

[S]kills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain—one’s own or anyone else’s. Because of this, incompetent individuals lack what cognitive psychologists variously term metacognition, metamemory, metacomprehension , or self-monitoring skills. These terms refer to the ability to know how well one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when one is likely to be in error. [93]

Dunning and Kruger’s study is particularly interesting considering that the researchers used logical reasoning skills—in the form of LSAT questions—as one of the metrics for measuring the effect. [94] Overall, subjects (forty-five Cornell undergraduates) overestimated their logical reasoning skills relative to their peers. [95] But bottom quartile subjects overestimated their performance by a staggering degree: although they scored at the 12th percentile on average, they nevertheless estimated that their general logical reasoning ability fell at the 68th percentile. [96] In other words, the poorest performers considered themselves significantly above average.

The point, of course, is not that law-school matriculants are incompetent. But the existence of the Dunning-Kruger effect may shed light on why those students most lacking in critical-thinking skills are either unaware of their deficits or are unable to rectify them. [97] More importantly, it suggests that students would benefit from learning specific metacognitive skills at an early stage in law school so that they can evaluate their own analytical competence before and after graduation.

Whatever the reasons for the (real or perceived) lack of critical thinking skills, a more appropriate discussion is what law schools can do to address any real deficits. There is no definite etiology for dwindling reasoning skills, nor is there any real need to articulate one. But if legal educators sense that “things are not as they were,” and that observation is coupled with increasing attrition rates or decreasing bar exam success, [98] then we must take corrective measures.

Part II: The Basics of Logic and Related Law-School Competencies

Law schools purport to teach students to “think like lawyers.” [99] But despite the need for clear and logical reasoning in the legal profession, law schools do not teach principles of logic. [100] Or do they?

The fact is that modern law curricula do use principles of logic—without denominating them as such. Law-school competencies—identifying issues, articulating rules and exceptions, comparing precedent to new facts, understanding public policy, addressing counterarguments—all require some form of logical reasoning. When law students apply a general legal rule to a specific legal issue on an exam, they engage in deductive reasoning. When students synthesize precedent into a general legal principle in legal writing class, they engage in inductive reasoning. When students argue in a brief or oral argument that a particular precedent should be followed, they engage in reasoning by analogy. [101]

But often, students see these law-school learning methods as nothing more than their professors’ personal methodological preferences. [102] They fail to appreciate that these techniques have been tested over thousands of years by history’s greatest thinkers. Hence the need for basic logic training: exposing neophyte law students to the basic principles of logic could provide them and their professors a common language to identify and correct deficits in reasoning and critical thinking. In addition, such training could—through the magic of brain plasticity—remediate deficiencies in cognitive analytical ability and foster better learning.

The principles of logic that could benefit a law-school curriculum in this way represent only a fraction of the discipline of formal logic. It would be impractical and counterproductive to teach a comprehensive additional discipline in the already-crowded list of required subjects. Sufficient metacognitive benefits can be achieved through exposure to three fundamental principles of logic: deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and fallacy. [103] While philosophers may cringe at such attenuation of the Art of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, [104] the goal is not to teach logic for its own sake. It is to provide students with a practical—perhaps heuristic—method for evaluating the quality of their reasoning. In short, one “familiar with the basics of logical thinking is more likely to argue effectively than one who is not.” [105]

a. Deductive Reasoning and Rule Application

Perhaps the easiest logic principle to teach law students is deduction, a lawyer’s most fundamental skill. [106] This process of reflective thinking [107] moves from general truth to specific conclusion. [108] In its simplest form, deduction involves two propositions which, if true, taken together lead undeniably to a third proposition. The classic tool of deductive reasoning is the syllogism, [109] demonstrated by this ubiquitous example:

All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.

The reliability of a syllogism comes from the objective certainty that the conclusion follows from the truth of the first two propositions, or “premises.” [110] The first, the “major premise,” represents a universal truth. The second, the “minor premise,” represents a specific and more narrowly applicable fact. The third, the conclusion, is a new idea that follows inferentially from the truth of the first two premises. It is this progression of thought, based on the relationship between known truths, that instills confidence in the resulting conclusion. [111]

Logicians test the validity of a syllogism by analyzing the patterns of the terms within each premise. [112] Each of the three premises is made up of two terms: a subject term (e.g., “All humans”) and a predicate term (“are mortal”). The specific idea contained in each of these terms appears twice in the syllogism. The “major term” appears in the major premise and the conclusion. The “minor term” appears in the minor premise and the conclusion. The “middle term” appears in the major and minor premises but not the conclusion. [113] So, in the Socrates example, “mortal” is the major term, “human” is the middle term, and “Socrates” is the minor term. [114]

All humans are mortal. Middle Term , Major Term

Socrates is a human . Minor Term , Middle Term

Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Minor Term, Major Term

Each term can further be described as “distributed” or “undistributed.” A subject term is distributed if it represents all members of the class and is undistributed if it represents only part of a class. [115] A predicate term is distributed if it is a negative statement and undistributed if it is a positive statement. [116] Only certain patterns of distributed and undistributed terms can be valid syllogistic forms. [117]

In the legal context, the syllogism involves taking a legal premise (an enacted or judicially created “rule”) and applying it to a factual premise (the facts of a case) to reach an objectively sound result (the conclusion). Judge Aldisert used a generic template, which he called the “prosecutor’s model,” to illustrate this fundamental “categorical syllogism” of legal reasoning:

Major premise: [Doing something] [violates the law] Minor premise: [The defendant] [did something] Conclusion: [The defendant] [violated the law]. [118]

The benefits of presenting legal ideas in this structured way are manifest. The structure promotes clarity and consistency and prevents many analytical errors. [119] It allows one to test the accuracy of individual arguments by observing each step of the analytical process. For lawyers, who must routinely debunk opponents’ arguments, this reasoning skill is critical. [120] Another helpful structure is the conditional (or hypothetical) syllogism, which takes an “if-then” format. The “if” term is known as the “antecedent” and the “then” term is known as the “consequent.” To be valid, a conditional syllogism must take one of two forms. [121] One such form, known as modus ponens , [122] is structured,

If p , then q ; p , therefore q.

The syllogism is valid when the antecedent is “affirmed” as existing or being true. For example,

If a non-competition clause is not in writing, then it is unenforceable. The defendant’s agreement not to compete was oral. Therefore, it is unenforceable.

When the minor premise of a conditional syllogism negates the consequent of the major premise, the form is called modus tollens . [123]

If p , then q ; Not q , then therefore not p .

These conditional syllogism forms appeared in a recent Florida First District Court of Appeals case, Madison v. Florida. [124] In Madison , the majority reversed the defendant’s conviction on the grounds that the trial court had abused its discretion in failing to properly consider and grant the defendant’s motion for a continuance. [125] The deferential standard of review for abuse of discretion required “affirmance of the trial court order unless no reasonable judge could have reached the decision challenged on appeal.” [126] But, in his dissent, Judge T. Kent Wetherell pointed out that, when broken down into a modus tollens syllogism, the majority’s decision demonstrated flawed logic: If reasonable judges could disagree as to the propriety of the trial court’s ruling, then the trial court did not abuse its discretion.

The trial court abused its discretion. Therefore, reasonable judges could not disagree as to the propriety of the trial court’s ruling. [127]

If the majority’s conclusion that the trial court had abused its discretion were true, then the antecedent (reasonable judges could not disagree as to the propriety of the trial court’s ruling) would also have to be true. But Judge Wetherell—presumably a reasonable judge— did disagree. The syllogism, according to Judge Wetherell, revealed the majority’s illogic. [128] He then demonstrated that, because the antecedent was true, the consequent (the trial court did not abuse its discretion) must be true as well under modus ponens . [129] Alas, deductive logic did not carry the day in Madison . But the case cogently demonstrates the utility of breaking an argument into its fundamental parts: doing so reveals illogic and, simultaneously, suggests the better outcome.

This greatly attenuated description of deductive reasoning would be enough to start students on the path to recognizing syllogisms in judicial opinions and, more importantly, to “shoehorning” [130] their own arguments into the illuminating pattern of syllogistic thought. By thinking meaningfully about their thought processes in this way, students gain metacognitive skills that could improve overall learning.

b. Inductive Reasoning and Precedent

In areas where the law is unsettled, deductive logic is an insufficient reasoning tool. [131] If there is no universal “rule,” there can be no material for the major premise in syllogistic thinking. [132] In such cases, rules must be extracted from many specific outcomes. [133] This is the process of inductive reasoning. [134]

“Induction is the inference from the observed to the unobserved, occasionally, and rather loosely, termed inferring the general from the specific.” [135] Unlike deductive reasoning, where the conclusion follows absolutely from the premises, inductive reasoning does not produce conclusions guaranteed to be correct. [136] However, if one examines enough similar, specific outcomes, one can ascertain with some confidence the resulting new principle. [137]

Consider scientific research. A scientist conducts enough trials of an experiment to be able to observe a pattern in the results. Numerous similar results can then suggest a general hypothesis: if A, B, and C all have result X, then D (which is similar to A, B, and C) will probably also have result X. As long as the scientist conducts enough trials, he or she can have confidence in the accuracy of the hypothesis. [138] It is unlikely, however, that a scientist would suggest that simply repeating results consistently creates scientific proof or absolute certainty in the result. [139] The process of induction as applied to legal reasoning is no different.

Inductive reasoning generally takes one of two forms: inductive generalization (or enumeration) or reasoning by analogy. [140] The process of inductive generalization lies at the heart of common law: in the absence of codified law, the accumulation of many specific holdings in individual cases has led, over time, to common acceptance—and formal articulation—of generalized legal precepts or principles. [141] The common law, therefore, “is but the accumulated expressions of the various judicial tribunals in their efforts to ascertain what is right and just . . . .” [142] Again, this inductive process does not provide certainty. It yields probabilities and generalities—but often extremely reliable ones.

One instructive example of inductive generalization is found in Justice Cardozo’s opinion in the early products liability case of MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co. [143] The case involved an injury from a collapsed wooden wheel of an automobile. [144] At the time, lack of privity of contract between the automobile’s owner and the manufacturer would have prevented the injured owner from collecting damages from the manufacturer. [145] Rather than decide the case on established contract principles (as the dissent suggested), [146] Justice Cardozo used inductive reasoning to fashion a rule that avoided the unjust result existing law seemed to require. Cardozo compared the results of sixteen factually diverse products liability cases. [147] He identified relevant similar or divergent features between the cases, such as whether the defendant was a manufacturer and whether there was a near certainty of injury, should the product be defective. [148] By analyzing a large enough number of specific circumstances of liability and comparing relevant resemblances between them, Cardozo was able to derive a new (and yet, not new) principle: A manufacturer who constructs an automobile using defective component parts may be liable to a remote purchaser of the automobile for injuries resulting from those parts. [149] Cardozo’s rule has withstood the test of time. [150] Its longevity can be attributed to the large number of cases Cardozo compared and the significance of the common features he analyzed. In other words, Cardozo used enough relevant particulars to generalize a reliable statement of the law.

Analogical reasoning is also a form of induction. It’s arguably one of the most crucial skills in the study and practice of law. [151] Analogy is simply the comparison of similarities between things with the attendant expectation that, if they resemble each other in several ways, then they will likely share some other property. [152] In the law, analogical reasoning involves comparing precedent—with established facts and outcome—to a new set of facts to determine the likely outcome of the new case. The more relevant similarities between the cases, the more likely their outcomes will be similar as well. Unlike inductive generalization, analogy’s reliability is not dependent on presenting a large number of particulars. [153] Rather, it is the quality of the comparison of the cases that makes the analogy reliable:

The success of the analogy depends on how significant the reader perceives the factual similarities between the two cases and whether any differences strike the reader as even more significant. An analogy can fail as much because an advocate ignores significant differences between two cases as because of a dearth of similarities. [154]

One could rightly state that our system of jurisprudence is built on a foundation of analogy. Stare decisis , the doctrine that underlies our case law system, requires that courts compare pending cases to existing precedent such that similar facts lead to similar legal consequences. Accordingly, students with a healthy working knowledge of induction (both inductive generalization and analogy) will not only better understand our legal system’s foundational principles but will be equipped to mold and manipulate legal ideas in useful ways.

c. Fallacy and the Quality of Arguments

If an argument can be defined as an attempt to establish the truth, a fallacy can be described as an argument that appears to do so–but doesn’t. [155] The ability to recognize fallacy allows law students to meaningfully evaluate judicial opinions and question outcomes in cases. As a result, it improves the quality of students’ argumentation and assessment of opponents’ counter-arguments.

Unfortunately, much like the public at large, students entering law school have been so inundated with arguments undermined by logical fallacies [156] that they are psychologically predisposed to accept logical fallacy as a substitute for sound reasoning. [157] People routinely “make logical mistakes, ignore logic altogether, or actually prefer certain illogical argument patterns.” [158] Essentially, audiences are conditioned to pick up on cues embedded in an argument that hint at the desired conclusions. These thinking shortcuts, known as “superficial heuristics,” often take the place of actual analysis. [159]

Of course, superficial heuristics and faulty reasoning should be avoided at all costs in law school. Exposing these thinking shortcuts and their attendant risk of error is the gateway to avoiding them. Therefore, learning a bit about common logical fallacies would help law students and law professors alike: When a student makes a faulty argument in class, the professor can describe the problem using the common language of functional logic.

A formal fallacy describes an error in the structure of an argument. [160] In a formal fallacy, a conclusion could be false even if all of the premises are true. [161] For example, using the classic “Socrates” syllogism:

All humans are mortal Socrates is mortal Therefore, Socrates is human.

This syllogism is fallacious because it is entirely possible that Socrates is the name of the neighbor’s cat. The formal error is the swapping of the minor term (in the minor premise) with the major term (in the conclusion). As with all formal logic, recognizing a formal fallacy requires familiarity with the patterns of distributed or undistributed terms. Again, this level of knowledge is beyond what’s needed for our limited goal of improving critical thinking. Nonetheless, it’s important to recognize that formal fallacy and formal deductive logic are two sides of the same coin.

Informal fallacies, also known as material fallacies, [162] are harder to spot. Informal fallacies could be described as mistakes in “the content (and possibly the intent) of the reasoning.” [163] Logicians have identified hundreds of distinct types of informal fallacies; [164] therefore, a comprehensive list of them is unworkable here. But some are so common—and so effective—that learning to recognize them should be considered a critical law-school skill. The following common fallacies demonstrate the potential deceptiveness of otherwise appealing arguments:

Ad Hominem : This fallacy is committed by abusing the proponent of an argument or by dismissing the proponent’s position on the grounds of the proponent’s appearance, circumstances, or background. [165] An advocate can cross the line from identifying weakness in an opponent’s argument into an improper attack on the opponent’s character. In Bauer v. Yellen , [166] the Second Circuit admonished counsel (and reduced its award of attorney fees) for the following ad hominem attack on its opponent, a pro se litigant: “Ms. Bauer has pursued this case blindly, recklessly, vindictively, maliciously and without a shred of evidence to support her wild and deluded claim of copyright infringement. . . . Ms. Bauer’s opposition papers mirror the nasty, mean-spirited approach she has taken in prosecuting this matter.” [167]

Bandwagon Fallacy : Also known as the ad populum fallacy, this type of fallacious argument suggests that, because a great number of people believe something, it must be objectively true. This fallacy occurs when a party argues that a court should adopt a rule because of “near universal agreement among . . . courts that have confronted [the] issue,” [168] rather than because of the merits of the rule.

Begging the Question : This fallacy assumes as true what is to be proved. [169] It can be as simple as a single step of faulty reasoning (e.g., “The hospital was negligent because it failed to use ordinary care”) or it can be buried in several steps of circular reasoning (e.g., An indigent prisoner claims a right to a free trial transcript because he wishes to argue ineffective assistance of counsel on appeal. There is no requirement to furnish an indigent prisoner with a free transcript unless he is unable to show that he has a non-frivolous claim. Because the prisoner cannot show that he has a non-frivolous claim, he has no right to a free trial transcript).

Fallacy of Accident : This fallacy, also known as dicto simpliciter , occurs when one applies a general rule to exceptional circumstances or facts. [170] For example, an Internet pornographer arguing that his website’s content is “Free Speech” may be committing the fallacy of accident by not acknowledging that limitations on obscenity and commercial speech exceptions likely apply—and must be analyzed—in his case.

Hasty Generalization : Essentially “jumping to conclusions.” A Hasty Generalization fallacy occurs when a conclusion is induced from too few particulars. [171] The reliability of any inductive generalization depends on having considered enough specific instances with identical outcomes to eliminate doubt as to the likelihood of non-conforming outcomes. But drawing a conclusion from only a few particular instances lacks that reliability. For example, in O’Conner v. Commonwealth Edison Co. , [172] an expert witness committed the fallacy when he testified that a plaintiff’s cataracts were caused by exposure to radiation at a nuclear plant where he worked. [173] His opinion was based on previously observing five patients with similar cataracts, all of which had been radiation-induced. [174]

Post Hoc : Any argument that suggests causation simply because one event preceded another is guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. [175] It’s also known as the false cause fallacy, and it is tricky. The danger of presuming a causal connection between events when none exists is obvious. But in a legal context, it’s often rational to conclude that when a legally significant event is followed by a result, that result probably flowed from the event. [176] For example, a criminal defendant could claim her medication prevented her guilty plea from being knowingly and voluntarily made. [177] It sounds reasonable, but absent evidence that the medication affected the defendant’s cognitive function, it’s spurious. Despite the fallacy, post hoc arguments are an effective tool for litigators since they are so enticing to jurors. [178] Straw Man : This is a fallacious argument in which one “creates the illusion of having refuted a solid proposition by substituting a similar, weaker proposition for it and refuting the substitute instead.” [179] By exaggerating or misrepresenting an opposing argument, one can more easily present one’s own position as reasonable. Consider the statement by former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who, during a Democratic Presidential Candidates Forum, suggested that opponents of gun control “think they should have a missile launcher in their backyard as a Constitutional right . . . .” [180]

These—and the scores of other known fallacies—all have the common attribute of obscuring the truth. But fallacies are often highly persuasive and can be used to manipulate—intentionally or otherwise. [181] And to properly represent clients and fulfill one’s professional responsibilities, lawyers must, if not pursue the truth, at least be aware of when it is being obscured. Knowing how to recognize fallacies is, in itself, a tool for honing critical thinking, and should be considered a fundamental lawyering skill.

Part III: Integrating Functional Logic Training Across the Law-School Curriculum

Regardless of how theoretically beneficial logic training may be, students cannot be expected to distill the principles of logic on their own. [182] Integrating basic, informal logic training into the law-school curriculum could be relatively painless and cost-effective and, most importantly, could begin to bridge the ever-widening gap between how students think and how academics expect them to think.

a. Logic During Orientation

The obvious moment to begin exposing students to a paradigmatic system of thinking is during orientation. Orientation varies in length, depth, and purpose from school to school. Schools use orientation for everything from registering parking passes and assigning study carrels to presenting more substantive programs that introduce the cohort to systems of law and the Socratic Method. Schools with more in-depth programs could introduce basic principles of logic in a two-to-three hour session, incorporating outside reading and a formative (perhaps online) assessment.

Orientation programs introducing logic should be straightforward and unintimidating. The goal is to build a solid foundation upon which to build the thinking processes students will encounter in the first weeks of law school and beyond. The classic categorical syllogism is a perfect starting point. [183] After introducing the basic form of a syllogism, the professor should provide numerous real-world examples of valid syllogisms:

Lack of sleep makes one drowsy during the day . Joe Law Student stayed up all night . Joe Law Student will be drowsy during the day . [184]

When we finish this orientation session, it will be time for lunch. We have not yet finished this orientation session. Therefore, it is not time for lunch. [185]

Once the basic form is clear, students should see examples of legal syllogisms: the basic application of rules to facts, along with their consequent conclusions. A formative assessment at this point could test students’ ability to distinguish rules from facts.

Students with innately sound reasoning skills (or, perhaps, previous training in logical reasoning) would recognize the deductive pattern at once and organize their thinking about legal issues accordingly. But for students who lack critical-thinking skills, this breakdown of the basic syllogistic form would provide a step-by-step process upon which to structure analysis. Armed with an effective process of reflective thinking, these students could avoid analytical missteps, which often go unnoticed until mid-term or final exams—in other words, too late.

In addition to basic deduction, Orientation should present the basic principles of inductive reasoning. Simple but engaging exercises in a “what do all these cases tell you about the law” model—presented as “induction”—would not only prepare students for the progressive integration of law that will happen once classes begin, but would give a name to the process they will be expected to use and, eventually, master. Professors involved in Orientation can enhance this benefit by preparing exercises specifically engineered to call out invalid induction. For example, a set of cases that seem to induce an obvious answer, save one anomalous result, tempts students to commit the fallacy of hasty generalization. [186] The fruits of the endeavor would be enduring: students who take the time to consider why their answers are good or bad are thinking like lawyers.

Introducing deductive and inductive reasoning during Orientation would, therefore, likely bear fruit once classes begin. By repeating these processes in different contexts as classes progress, students will naturally strengthen their brains’ neural networks responsible for critical thinking. [187]

b. Logic in Doctrinal Classes

Merely knowing the principles that distinguish good and bad reasoning is not enough. To enhance critical thinking, law students should replicate the process of putting analytical components together in multiple contexts. In other words, students should be encouraged to use syllogistic logic across the curriculum.

But herein lies the greatest difficulty: changing the way law students think means a change in the way law professors think and teach. Law professors, however, are not generally known for their great desire to implement teaching innovations. [188] Fortunately, simple adjustments to existing instructional models might yield unexpected mutual benefits and ease frustration for both professors and students.

In nearly every American law-school class, students read appellate decisions in casebooks and answer professors’ questions about the holdings and principles of law contained in the cases. This “Case Law” or “Socratic” [189] method of instruction remains the standard teaching method in law schools, despite concerns about its effectiveness and recommendations against its widespread use. [190] But despite its prevalence, law schools generally fail at explaining the process and goals of the Socratic Method. [191] Many professors assume that students implicitly recognize these goals. [192] There is generally no explanation of the underlying thought process that gets the students to the “right” answer. [193] Many students eventually work out that professors are not simply “hiding the ball,” but are, rather, drawing out reasoned analysis. Others however, may stumble through law school never quite understanding the reason for the trauma and humiliation that the Socratic Method engenders. [194]

The frustration is mutual. First-year professors complain that students’ exam answers are missing analysis. [195] Students jump from identifying a rule to stating a conclusion with no significant application of the rule to facts in between. What is missing in those answers, logically speaking, is the syllogistic minor premise. [196] On an exam, many students struggle to even articulate the accurate legal issue.

Consider a scenario where a defendant is charged with aggravated battery for using a deadly weapon. The facts state that the defendant sloshed household bleach in the victim’s face. [197] The rule is that any object can be a deadly weapon if it is used in such a way as to make it likely to cause great bodily harm. [198] It may seem obvious to an experienced lawyer that the precise legal issue is “whether bleach, sloshed in a victim’s face, is likely to cause great bodily harm.” But a student with poor analytical skills might begin by stating the issue as “whether the defendant used a deadly weapon” or even more obtuse, “whether defendant committed aggravated battery.” With this as a starting point, it’s no wonder that students resort to incomplete, heuristic thinking in place of reasoned analysis.

Now, imagine if every professor began requiring students to express arguments in the form of a syllogism. Certainly, the process would be a struggle, if not downright ugly, in the first weeks or even months of law school. But with repetition, students would quickly become proficient at identifying the proper components of the syllogistic process—thereby clarifying their reasoning. A simple approach to achieve these benefits in nearly any law-school classroom is to require students to articulate rules as “if-then” statements. [199] By reframing rules in this way, students are forced to critically examine the constituent elements of the rule: its requirements and its consequences. [200] Consider the following basic rules in Torts, Constitutional Law, and Civil Procedure:

If the plaintiff proves elements X, Y, and Z, then tort liability is established. If the state deprives a citizen of notice and opportunity to be heard, then the right to Due Process is violated. If a party currently resides in the state and intends to remain there indefinitely, then he or she qualifies as a “citizen” for diversity jurisdiction purposes.

Note that these simple rules are structured so as to force the rule’s requirement (the “if”) and consequence (the “then”) into plain view. This skill alone is beneficial for students because it not only trains the brain to recognize the pattern of rules, it transfers to skills necessary for legal writing and drafting: coherence and clarity. More importantly, however, these if-then rules form the major premise of a conditional syllogism. In such a major premise, the “if” clause is the middle term and the “then” clause is the major term.

Once students are comfortable articulating rules as the major premise of a syllogism, the next step is to present the facts of a case—whether a hypothetical presented by the professor or an assigned case reading—as the minor premise. Here are the minor premises that correlate to the major premises above:

Defendant did facts A B C. The state imposed a fine without affording the party an opportunity for a hearing. Plaintiff owns a houseboat that is moored in the state.

The subject of each minor premise is the minor term. The predicate of each minor premise is the middle term—or at least it would be, if the syllogism were complete. In a complete syllogism, of course, the middle terms would match exactly. Here, the middle terms do not match—yet. This is the advantage of this syllogistic exercise: students can immediately spot the precise legal issue in a case by joining the two middle term positions (in bold):

The issues revealed in this way are:

Do facts A B C —> satisfy elements X Y Z? Did the state’s imposing a fine without affording the party an opportunity for a hearing —> deprive the citizen of notice and opportunity to be heard? (YES) Does merely owning a houseboat currently moored in the state —> mean that a party currently resides in the state and intends to remain there indefinitely? (NO)

In this way, the analysis can be tested for accuracy. And in the first weeks and months of law school, the reliability of students’ analyses is of paramount importance.

These functional logic exercises, repeated in various contexts across the curriculum, would undoubtedly have at least some metacognitive benefits. And professors might find that the process improves not only students’ preparation, but also the quality of dialogue between them and their students.

c. Logic in Legal Writing and Analysis Courses

There is no question that legal writing professors are on the front lines of recognizing—and attempting to mitigate—shortcomings in law students’ reasoning. Legal writing assignments force students to reveal their thought processes on paper. [201] In grading their memos and briefs, we see that students’ “confusing prose reflects their confused thinking.” [202] Moreover, legal writing courses bridge a curricular gap between doctrine and skills. Students learn theory in their doctrinal courses and learn to apply it in a meaningful way toward the resolution of a client’s legal issue in legal writing classes. These courses help students integrate material across curriculum “because they do not separate the learning of theory from its application.” [203] Naturally, this setting is ideal for reinforcing functional logic skills.

Most law students are exposed to fundamental logical reasoning in their first-year research and writing course. They just don’t know it. Basic IRAC structure (Issue, Rule, Analysis, Conclusion)—the hallmark of legal writing organization—represents a deductive syllogistic process. [204] But written legal analysis involves induction as well. [205] Virtually no analysis is complete without incorporating analogical reasoning by comparing the facts of one’s case to precedent. And when a factual scenario presents novel or troublesome facts that seem not to fit established law, students are taught to engage in rule synthesis. [206] In other words, the legal writing classroom is rich with opportunities to practice deduction and induction in ways that incorporate both theory and practical application. What’s critical, however, is for legal writing professors to use logic terminology (i.e., deduction, induction, analogy, fallacy) when teaching these skills. It’s not that IRAC , synthesis , case illustration , or application are bad terms: legal writing professors have had great success using these and other labels for parts of analysis and should continue to do so. [207] Rather, it’s the additional benefit of reinforcing the concepts of logical thought in various contexts that will strengthen those skills across the board. [208] Accordingly, during the writing-instruction phase of a typical first-year legal-writing course, professors should take every opportunity to point out deductive and inductive analysis wherever it can be found. The professor should demonstrate that the Rule Synthesis section (the “R” of IRAC) has, overall, the same function as the major premise of a syllogism: as a unit, it represents a universal truth against which the facts of the case must be tested. Ideally, students should be exposed to several such deductive (or “rule-based” [209] ) analyses during their first legal-writing class session. Doing so connects legal writing not only to the deduction they learned about in Orientation, but also to the deductive processes used in their doctrinal courses. It also serves as a jumping-off point for the next step: the inductive process of applying precedent to new facts.

New law students learning predictive writing [210] are often confounded by the concept of analogizing facts of a case to established precedent. [211] It’s not that students don’t understand analogy: they’ve likely mastered the “head is to hat as foot is to shoe” analogy prevalent on the LSAT. [212] Rather, it’s the fact that using multiple (and often seemingly contradictory) analogies to reach a conclusion is a foreign concept to most non-lawyers. Moreover, even the conclusions reached by such a process can be less than satisfying, since they lack certainty. [213]

In drafting their first memos, rookie law students often make the mistake of analogizing a single precedent case to the facts of the memo problem. Despite having described several precedent cases, they default to choosing “the closest” single case to apply to the untested facts without endeavoring to reconcile other precedent or, much less, the law as a whole. The result is a superficial conclusion and inadequate prediction. To combat this tendency, legal-writing professors should reinforce that the two inductive forms, (1) inductive generalization and (2) analogy, should feature in the application (the “A” of IRAC) section of a memo.

In inductive generalization, a legal writer extracts multiple, often intersecting, points of similarity among a representative group of precedent cases to reach a working standard. [214] Say a legal writing professor includes four precedent cases in a closed-universe memo assignment. The professor undoubtedly chose those cases because they represent basic concepts relevant to the expected analysis. Case 1 has characteristics A and B ; Case 2 has characteristics A and C ; Case 3 has characteristics similar to A , B , and C , but mostly hinges on D ; and Case 4 falls short on A , B , C , and D (and, accordingly, fails to meet the legal standard at issue). Again, a student may be tempted to base his or her application simply on which of these cases most closely resembles the untested set of facts. But a professor can avoid this dangerous shortcut by taking time in class to break down each case conceptually, identifying and describing characteristics A , B , C , and D , and, where possible, articulating a formula describing characteristics necessary for the standard to be met.

Disorderly conduct provides a good example. In Florida, disorderly conduct is rather abstractly defined by Florida Statute section 877.03 as conduct that “corrupt[s] the public morals,” “outrage[s] the sense of public decency,” or “affect[s] the peace and quiet of persons who may witness [it].” [215] This mushy definition makes pure deduction difficult. Precedent, however, provides more helpful concepts. In one case, a defendant’s loud verbal conduct attracted a crowd of curious onlookers, but it was his physical act of interfering with the police officer’s lawful duties that made his conduct disorderly. [216] In another case, the defendant’s verbal conduct attracted a crowd, and he was physically aggressive toward an officer; this was also sufficient to constitute disorderly conduct. [217] In a third case, the defendant’s verbal conduct attracted a crowd that became hostile toward the officer, and this too was considered disorderly conduct. [218] But in a case where a defendant’s loud verbal conduct merely attracted a crowd of annoyed onlookers, the conduct was not considered disorderly. [219]

From these cases, at least three conceptual points of comparison arise: (A) conduct that draws a crowd; (B) conduct that interferes with an officer’s lawful duties; and (C) conduct that puts the officer in danger. In the cases where the disorderly conduct standard was met, there was some combination of (A) attracting a crowd and either (B) interfering with the officer’s duties or (C) putting the officer in danger. In the one case where the standard was not met, only (A) was present. Therefore, even from this limited selection of precedent, an implicit working standard can be extracted: Where (A)+(B) or (A)+(C) are present, conduct will be considered disorderly. If the formula is reliable, it should explain the results in all cases.

What’s happened here is induction: a general principle has been extracted from a number of particulars based on relevant similarities. [220] That general principle would then be applied to the untested facts of a new case. Admittedly, four cases may be a small sample from which to extract a general standard. But if the chosen cases are highly representative of all the cases on point, then the standard is likely to be highly reliable. [221] Nonetheless, because the conclusion reached by this process is uncertain, further substantiation is needed. That’s where analogy comes in.

Using analogical reasoning, the legal writer justifies his or her conclusion in terms of the chosen precedent. [222] Our typical “rookie” law student tried analogy, but failed to connect it to the law as a whole; therefore, it was superficial and analytically flimsy. But analogy coupled with the application of the inductive working standard demonstrates that a predicted outcome is consistent not only with an individual case, but also with the entire body of law on that issue. Thus, instead of describing random or disconnected similarities and distinctions between precedent cases and a set of untested facts, students can think of analogical reasoning as “proof” that the inductive formula was reliable.

Back to the disorderly conduct example. Suppose a memo fact pattern described a suspect—a witness to a shooting—who was loudly insisting that an officer take his statement, despite the fact that the officer was busy arresting the shooter. The suspect’s antics of yelling at the officer attracted a crowd of onlookers. The suspect, perhaps fueled by having an audience, put his face within two inches of the officer’s face, causing the officer to push him away with a free hand. The issue, of course, is whether the suspect can be charged with disorderly conduct.

In applying the law to these facts (the “A” of IRAC), a writer may initially want to point out that the statute does not provide concrete enough concepts upon which to base a purely deductive analysis. [223] Therefore, the analysis would be inductive. First, the writer should articulate the inductive generalization that the charge is generally supported by evidence that the defendant’s conduct (A) caused a crowd to form and either (B) interfered with an officer’s lawful duties or (C) put the officer in danger. Based on that working standard, the writer can state that the facts satisfy the inductive standard: the suspect both attracted a crowd and interfered with the officer making the arrest.

Next, it’s time to analogize the precedent cases. Because analogy compares cases with the expectation that, if they resemble each other in several relevant ways, then they will likely share the same outcome, [224] the writer must demonstrate that the specific relevant similarities between the chosen precedent and the untested facts support the stated conclusion. Because the relevant characteristics ( A , B , C , or D ) have already been described in the inductive generalization, it’s sufficient to briefly connect them to the specific facts of the memo problem. Analogy, in this sense, further substantiates the reliability of the inductive process.

What I’ve described above does not differ significantly from analytical processes taught by the average legal writing professor. But I believe there’s a significant additional benefit gained from reinforcing basic logic processes and terminology along the way.

d. Logic in Oral Advocacy

One final golden opportunity to reinforce basic logic is during the oral argument component of a first-year persuasive-writing class. Besides being a blood-curdlingly terrifying event forever etched in students’ memories and an important rite of passage, the appellate oral argument is fertile ground for using and recognizing informal fallacy. Generally, the lead-up to the oral argument is preceded by several weeks of instruction on oral persuasion and, ideally, in-class practice. Students already exposed to the concept of informal fallacy would be more adept at responding to their opponents’ positions, perhaps even identifying faulty logic by name. A student’s argument that “opposing counsel asserts X, but that is without merit because (restate original premise for the ninth time)” can become “opposing counsel asserts X, which falls into the logical fallacy of hasty generalization and is, therefore, not a reliable result.”

One way to achieve this benefit is to use class time to brainstorm every possible fallacious (but compelling) argument that could be made in the context of an appellate-brief fact pattern. Do the facts of the case allow for an improper appeal to authority? Can an ad hominem argument be made against an unsympathetic witness? This exercise not only reinforces the meaning of individual fallacies in a practical way; it challenges students to test how far advocacy can stretch before it becomes no longer persuasive.

Introducing basic logic into the legal writing classroom, therefore, requires little substantive change to existing pedagogy. But if students learn that the familiar paradigms of legal writing are exactly the same logic principles introduced in orientation and reinforced in doctrinal classes, their ability to critically think about legal issues—and their overall comprehension—could significantly increase.

Legal education in the United States has evolved over time in response to economic and social change. But the social, educational, and technological changes of recent decades, which have noticeably altered students’ ability to think critically, merit at least an adjustment in the way law schools teach. The time-tested methods of logic—even when pared down to their most practical and functional components—could begin to remediate some of the problems students face in the modern law-school classroom.

See generally Paul Douglas Callister, Beyond Training: Law Librarianship’s Quest for the Pedagogy of Legal Research Education , 95 L. Lib. J. 7, 9 (2003) (discussing legal employers’ frustration with new graduates’ poor legal research skills); Rebecca C. Flanagan, The Kids Aren’t Alright: Rethinking the Law Student Skills Deficit , 2015 BYU Educ. & L.J. 135, 138 (2015) (discussing possible reasons for law students’ decreasing critical-thinking skills); Courtney G. Lee, Changing Gears to Meet the “New Normal” in Legal Education , 53 Duq. L. Rev. 39 , 67 (2015) (decreased critical-thinking skills of many law schools’ entering classes is likely to continue for years to come); Karen Sloan, Practice Ready? Law Students and Practitioners Disagree , Nat’l L.J . (March 6, 2015), https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/almID/1202719928678/?slreturn=20171030205801 (last visited Nov. 30, 2017) (discussing a survey by BarBri finding that only 23% of practitioners felt that graduating law students were ready to practice law); James Etienne Viator, Legal Education’s Perfect Storm: Law Students’ Poor Writing and Legal Analysis Skills Collide with Dismal Employment Prospects, Creating the Urgent Need to Reconfigure the First-Year Curriculum , 61 Cath. U. L. Rev. 735, 740—41 (2012) (discussing law-school “education-to-profession” disjunction).

Richard Arum & Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses 35—36 (2011).

Flanagan, supra note 1, at 144—45.

Changes needed to implement innovative curriculum changes have been “hampered,” in part, by American Bar Association regulations. Kristen K. Tiscione, How the Disappearance of Classical Rhetoric and the Decision to Teach Law as a “Science” Severed Theory from Practice in Legal Education , 51 Wake Forest L. Rev. 385 (2016); see also ABA Sec. Leg. Educ. & Admissions to the Bar , Managing Director’s Guidance Memo: Standard 316, Bar Passage (Aug. 2016), http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/governancedocuments/2016_august_guidance_memo_S316.authcheckdam.pdf (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Michael Scriver & Richard Paul , Defining Critical Thinking, The Critical Thinking Community , http://www.criticalthinking.org/pages/defining-critical-thinking/766 (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Joanne G. Kurfiss, Critical Thinking: Theory, Research, Practice, and Possibilities , ASHE-ERIC Higher Educ. Rep. 1, 5 (1988).

Flanagan, supra note 1, at 144.

Id. (quoting Judith Welch Wegner, Reframing Legal Education’s "Wicked Problems ," 61 Rutgers L. Rev. 867, 871 (2009)).

Henry Ford is reported to have said, “Thinking is hard work, and that’s why so few people do it.”

See Kurfiss, supra note 7, at 14.

Stephen M. Rice, Indiscernible Logic: Using the Logical Fallacies of the Illicit Major Term and the Illicit Minor Term as Litigation Tools , 47 Willamette L. Rev. 101, 108 (2010).

Cheryl B. Preston et al., Teaching “Thinking Like a Lawyer”: Metacognition and Law Students , 2014 BYU L. Rev. 1053, 1057 (2014) (defining metacognition as “thinking about thinking”).

Ruggero J. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers: A Guide to Clear Legal Thinking , 28—29 (Nat’l Inst. for Trial Advo. 3d Ed. 1997); Edwin W. Patterson, Logic in the Law , 90 U. Pa. L. Rev. 875 (1942).

See, e.g. , Michael R. Smith, Rhetoric Theory and Legal Writing: An Annotated Bibliography , 3 J. ALWD 129 (2006) (listing dozens of scholarly works discussing logic and rhetoric in the discipline of legal writing); Richard D. Friedman, Logic and Elements (Symposium: Premises and Conclusions: Symbolic Logic for Legal Analysis), 73 Notre Dame L. Rev. 575 (1998).

Ruggero J. Aldisert et al., Logic for Law Students: How to Think Like a Lawyer , 69 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 1, 2 (2007).

Paula Lustbader, Construction Sites, Building Types, and Bridging Gaps: A Cognitive Theory of the Learning Progression of Law Students , 33 Willamette L. Rev. 315, 338 (1997) (“What is expected of students at the undergraduate level is vastly different from what is expected in law school. Prior to law school, learning mainly involved memorizing and regurgitating predigested, prepackaged, and organized information obtained from textbooks, lectures, and the media. Consequently, they are ill-prepared to read critically, synthesize rules, or analyze material to the extent required in law school.”).

Jesse Franklin Brumbaugh, Legal Reasoning and Briefing: Logic Applied to the Preparation, Trial and Appeal of Cases, with Illustrative Briefs and Forms 59 (1917) (“Ordinary logical theory requires but truthfulness only in the materials of the syllogism and form, but legal logic adds the social elements of justice and equity . . . .”); James R. Maxeiner, Thinking Like A Lawyer Abroad: Putting Justice into Legal Reasoning , 11 Wash. U. Global Stud. L. Rev . 55, 60 (2012) (“It is elementary learning that law seeks justice.”).

Ruth Vance & Susan Stuart, Of Moby Dick and Tartar Sauce: The Academically Underprepared Law Student and the Curse of Overconfidence , 53 Duq. L. Rev. 133, 134 (2015) (“[M]any matriculating law students arrive at law school woefully underprepared at the same time legal educators are challenged with the task of producing practice-ready graduates.”).

Aaron N. Taylor, Diversity as a Law School Survival Strategy , 59 St. Louis U.L.J 321, 329 (2015).

Id . While not the only predictor of law-school success, the LSAT measures “natural skill or reasoning,” skills that law schools and state bars consider essential to lawyering. Robert Steinbuch & Kim Love, Color-Blind-Spot: The Intersection of Freedom of Information Law and Affirmative Action in Law School Admissions , 20 Tex. Rev. L. & Pol. 181, 201 (2016) (citing Nicholas Georgakopoulos, Bar Passage: GPA and LSAT, Not Bar Reviews (Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law Research Paper No. 2013-30 Sept. 19, 2013), http://bit.ly/20Ar8aB [ perma.cc/62MU-JRR7 ]).

Jay Sterling Silver, Responsible Solutions: Reply to Tamanaha and Campos , 2 Tex. A&M L. Rev . 215, 229—30 (2014).

Vance & Stuart, supra note 23, at 137. A full discussion of the deficiencies of K-12 and undergraduate educations is beyond the scope of the article.

“Despite a dramatic decrease in hours spent studying, college students are receiving higher grades.” Flanagan, supra note 1, at 139 (citing Kevin Carey, ‘Trust Us’ Won’t Cut It Anymore , Chron. Higher Educ. , Jan. 18, 2011, http://chronicle.com/article/Trust-Us-Wont-Cut-It/125978/ (last visited Dec. 12, 2017). (“Yes, there’s been grade inflation. A-minus is the new C.”); Lee, supra note 1, at 66; see also Rebecca C. Flanagan, Do Med Schools Do It Better? Improving Law School Admissions by Adopting a Medical School Admissions Model , 53 Duq. L. Rev . 75, 81 (2015) (“Many students can earn above-average grades throughout their undergraduate years by artfully selecting courses and majors.”).

Lee, supra note 1, at 66.

Flanagan, supra note 1, at 135—36.

Viator, supra note 1, at 753 (“From the late seventeenth century through the end of the nineteenth century, all levels of American schooling were dedicated to the study of classical literature and history.”).

Flanagan, supra note 1, at 148; see also Marilyn R. Walter, Erasing the Lines Between the Law School and the Liberal Arts Curricula: A Comment on “A Liberal Education in Law,” 1 J. Alwd. 153, 154 (2002) (discussing that familiarity with the classical authors and with principles of oratory was viewed, pre-Civil War, as essential to a lawyer’s excellence).

Tiscione, supra note 4, at 400.

Carol T. Christ, Myth: A Liberal Arts Education Is Becoming Irrelevant , Am. Council on Educ. (Spring 2012), http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/Myth-A-Liberal-Arts-Education-Is-Becoming-Irrelevant.aspx (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

“[T]he best preparation for the intense phase of the apprenticeship we call ‘going to law school’ is a broad-based liberal arts education.” Patricia Sayre, “Socrates is Mortal”: Formal Logic and the Pre-Law Undergraduate , 73 Notre Dame L. Rev . 689, 703 (1998).

Flanagan, supra note 1, at 148.

Doug Mataconis, College Students Lack Critical Thinking Skills, But Who’s To Blame? , Outside The Beltway (Jan. 18, 2011), http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/college-students-lack-critical-thinking-skills-but-whos-to-blame/ (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

“Most of the top earners in the liberal arts end up matching only the bottom earners in science, technology, engineering and mathematics — known as the STEM fields — and some will earn less than high school graduates who have vocational skills, like welders and mechanics.” Patricia Cohen, A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding , N.Y. Times (Feb. 21, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/business/a-rising-call-to-promote-stem-education-and-cut-liberal-arts-funding.html (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Id. ; Michael Delucchi, “Liberal Arts” Colleges and the Myth of Uniqueness , 68(4) J. of Higher Educ. 414, 414 (1997) (“[T]he curricular trend in higher education since about 1970 has been toward studies related to work . . . . Enrollment concerns in recent years have compelled many liberal arts colleges to abandon or sharply scale back their arts and sciences curriculum in order to accommodate student preoccupation with the immediate job market.”); see also Mark Yates, The Carnegie Effect: Elevating Practical Training over Liberal Education in Curricular Reform , 17 Legal Writing 233, 243 (2011) (“Since the 1970s, undergraduate institutions in the United States have been shifting their curricular emphasis from liberal arts to more professionally oriented education. This shift is due largely to enrollment concerns caused by changes in the labor market and corresponding changes in the expectations of entering students.”); Judith T. Younger, Legal Education: An Illusion , 75 Minn. L. Rev. 1037, 1043 (1991) (arguing that, in attempting to democratize higher education, colleges and universities abandoned the liberal arts in favor of specialization and vocationalism).

Nicholas Lemann, Liberal Education and Professionals , 90 Liberal Educ. 14 (Spring 2004), http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/le-sp04/le-sp04feature1.cfm (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Arum & Roksa , supra note 2, at 96—98.

See Flanagan, supra note 1, at 140 (describing Collegiate Learning Assessment test subjects as similarly situated students from wide variety of colleges and universities).

Id . (characterizing critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving, and writing skills as essential skills during the first year of law school).

Arum & Roksa, supra note 2, at 121.

Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education , http://www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/study-research/ (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College, Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education, Fourth Year Change Summary , http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/333946/10418206/1296073333850/4-year-change-summary-website.pdf?token=ZVEVCl3%2ButHXke%2Fk0YqlLCJCYMo%3D (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

“[S]tudies have not found positive evidence of broad-based skills acquisition by college students since the 1990s.” Flanagan, supra note 1, at 142.

Id. at 143.

Id. (quoting Arum & Roksa, supra note 2, at 40).

Elizabeth Olsen, Study Cites Lower Standards in Law School Admissions , N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 27, 2015, at B1; Jennifer M. Cooper, Smarter Law Learning: Using Cognitive Science to Maximize Law Learning , 44 Cap. U.L. Rev. 551, 552 (2016).

See generally Taylor, supra note 24.

Jeremy Berke, Law-School Grads are Bombing the Bar and It’s a Sign of Trouble for Legal Education , Business Insider , http://www.businessinsider.com/bar-passage-exam-rates-have-dropped-in-several-key-states-2015-11 (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Shailini Jandial George, Teaching the Smartphone Generation: How Cognitive Science Can Improve Learning in Law School , 66 Me. L. Rev. 163, 169 (2013).

Id. at 172.

Id. at 172–73.

Sara Bernard, Neuroplasticity: Learning Physically Changes the Brain , EDUTOPIA (Dec. 1, 2010), http://www.edutopia.org/neuroscience-brain-based-learning-neuroplasticity (Dec. 12, 2017).

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains 31, 34 (2011).

Id. at 120.

Jennie Bricker, Where No One Has Gone Before: Practicing Law in the Digital Age , 72 J. Mo. B. 18 (2016).

Carr, supra note 60, at 65.

See id. at 72.

Id . at 75.

Id. at 122.

Id. at 141—42.

Id . at 121.

A slightly exaggerated, but not-all-too-unrealistic multi-tasking scenario is described at the outset of George, supra note 55, at 164.

Carr , supra note 60, at 140.

Vance & Stuart, supra note 22, at 141.

Daniel M. Wegner & Adrian F. Ward, The Internet Has Become the External Hard Drive for our Memories , Sci. Am. (Dec. 1, 2013), http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-internet-has-become-the-external-hard-drive-for-our-memories/ (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Patrick Meyer, The Google Effect, Multitasking, and Lost Linearity: What We Should Do , 42 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 705, 716 (2016).

William Poundstone, The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber — It’s Making Us More “Meta-Ignorant,” N.Y. Mag. (July 27, 2016) , http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/the-internet-isnt-making-us-dumber-its-making-us-more-meta-ignorant.html (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Meyer, supra note 74, at 712—13.

Gabriel H. Teninbaum, Spaced Repetition: A Method for Learning More Law in Less Time , 17 J. High Tech. L. 273, 302 (2017).

Neil Howe & William Strauss , Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation 4 (2000) (defining a Millennial as anyone born during or after 1982).

Data suggests that Millennials do not read print newspapers, watch television news, or purposely visit news websites, instead receiving information on selected stories through social media. The Media Insight Project, How Millenials Get News: Inside the Habits of American’s First Digital Generation , http://www.mediainsight.org/Pages/how-millennials-get-news-inside-the-habits-of-americas-first-digital-generation.aspx (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Poundstone, supra note 77 (“Most — more than 50 percent — of millennials can’t name anyone who shot a U.S. president or discovered a planet; they don’t know the ancient city celebrated for its hanging gardens, the one destroyed by Mount Vesuvius, or the emperor said to have fiddled while Rome burned; and most millennials can’t name the single word uttered by the raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem.”).

“The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982.” Joel Stein, Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation , Time Magazine (May 20, 2013) http://time.com/247/millennials-the-me-me-me-generation/ ; see also Vance & Stuart, supra note 22, at 134—35.

Kari Mercer Dalton, Bridging the Digital Divide and Guiding the Millennial Generation’s Research and Analysis , 18 Barry L. Rev . 167, 173—74 (2012).

Eric A. DeGroff, Training Tomorrow’s Lawyers: What Empirical Research Can Tell Us About the Effect of Law School Pedagogy on Law Student Learning Styles , 36 S. Ill. U.L.J. 251 (2012).

Vance & Stuart, supra note 22, at 134—35.

Anthony Niedwiecki, Teaching for Lifelong Learning: Improving the Metacognitive Skills of Law Students Through More Effective Formative Assessment Techniques , 40 Cap. U. L. Rev. 149, 160 (2012); Cooper, supra note 53, at 556.

Cooper, supra note 52, at 556.

See generally Justin Kruger & David Dunning, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments , 77 J. Personality & Soc. Psychology 1121 (1999).

Id . at 1121.

Id . (citations omitted).

Id. at 1124.

Participants placed themselves in the 66th percentile relative to others, significantly higher than the actual mean of 50. Id . at 1123.

Id . at 1125.

Legal Writing guru Bryan Garner linked the Dunning-Kruger effect to the legal profession. He suggested that attorneys overestimate their writing skills and, therefore, fail to take steps to improve it, even when doing so would be beneficial. Bryan A. Garner, Why Lawyers Can’t Write: Science Has Something to Do with It, and Law Schools Are Partly to Blame , 99- Mar. A.B.A. J. 24 (2013).

See 2016 MBE Statistics, Nat’l Conf. Bar Examiners, http://www.ncbex.org/publications/statistics/mbe-statistics/ (last visited Sept. 29, 2017) (showing a decline in MBE National Mean Scaled Scores from 2007 to 2016).

“Thinking like a lawyer” has been described as “employing logic to construct arguments.” Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 1.

Jack L. Landau, Logic for Lawyers , 13 Pac. L.J. 59, 60 (1981); Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 2; Stephen M. Rice, False Persuasion, Superficial Heuristics, and the Power of Logical Form to Test the Integrity of Legal Argument , 34 Pace L. Rev. 76, 76 (2014).

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 28—29; see Patterson, supra note 16, at 903 — 04 (describing types of analogies).

Professors often hear, “I know the material; I just didn’t present it the way you wanted it.”

The Honorable Jack L. Landau, Justice of the Supreme Court of Oregon, proposed essentially the same in 1981, when he was an Instructor of Law at Northwestern School of Law of Lewis and Clark College:

Much of what is currently taught in logic classes is entirely too cumbersome for analysis. However, there are certain techniques, namely deduction, induction and analogy, and the avoidance of informal fallacies, that can easily be taught to first-year students, that do have a direct bearing on the legal reasoning process, and that can definitely improve the quality of reasoning and critical thinking skills exhibited by students and lawyers alike.

Landau, supra note 100, at 60.

Judge Aldisert expressed similar unease at possibly offending logicians and mathematicians. Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 2. But it is, perhaps, the greatest approbation to demonstrate Logic’s utility even in such a highly diluted form.

“Deductive reasoning is a mental operation that a student, lawyer or judge must employ every working day.” Aldisert, supra note 16, at 45.

See, e.g. , id. at 48—49.

There are three basic types of syllogisms:

Conditional Syllogism: If A is true then B is true (If A then B). Categorical Syllogism: If A is in C (and B is in A) then B is in C. Disjunctive Syllogism: If A is true, then B must be false (A or B).

See id . at 145.

This is true, of course, only if the syllogism is valid.

Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 4.

See generally Aldisert, supra note 16.

Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 6.

For beginners, it may be easier to remember that the major term represents the broad or universal class, the middle term represents a portion of that class, and the minor term represents the narrowest or most specific component.

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 57—58.

The informal or practical logic envisioned in this article does not necessarily require students to understand these patterns or, for that matter, to create exclusively valid syllogisms. Rather, it is the process of forcing ideas into a syllogism—whether revealing an objective “truth” or not—that is likely to improve students’ critical-thinking skills. A secondary effect of this approach may be that some students become interested in more formal logic and pursue it further.

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 237.

“[Formal logic] structure allows legal thinkers to comparatively analyze legal argument, by comparing and contrasting it to necessarily valid or invalid logical structures, and reach conclusive logical decisions about the validity or invalidity of the form of the argument.” Stephen M. Rice, Conspicuous Logic: Using the Logical Fallacy of Affirming the Consequent as a Litigation Tool , 14 Barry L. Rev . 1, 13 (2010).

Andrew Jay McClurg, Logical Fallacies and the Supreme Court: A Critical Examination of Justice Rehnquist’s Decisions in Criminal Procedure Cases , 59 U . Colo. L. Rev . 741, 774 (1988).

Rice, supra note 120, at 9.

132 So. 3d 237 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2013).

Id. at 245.

Id. at 247 (quoting Clark v. State, 95 So. 3d 986, 987 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2012)).

Id. at 247 n. 16.

Naturally, it is possible that, in this particular judgment on this particular issue, Judge Wetherell was not reasonable. Nonetheless, his use of conditional syllogism to compare the facts (judges disagreed about the ruling) to the legal standard (no abuse of discretion if reasonable judges could disagree) was effective, in theory.

Id . at 12.

See Aldisert , supra note 16, at 48.

Kent Sinclair Jr., Comment, Legal Reasoning: In Search of an Adequate Theory of Argument , 59 Calif. L. Rev. 821, 827 (1971), http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/californialawreview/vol59/iss3/13 (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 13.

Anita Schnee, Legal Reasoning "Obviously ," 3 Legal Writing 105, 112 (1997), http://www.legalwritingjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/volume3.pdf (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 92—93.

Carlo Rovelli, Science is not Certainty , NEW REPUBLIC (July 11, 2014), https://newrepublic.com/article/118655/theoretical-phyisicist-explains-why-science-not-about-certainty (“Science is extremely reliable; it’s not certain.”) (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

Mary Massaron Ross, A Basis for Legal Reasoning: Logic on Appeal , 3 J. Ass’n Legal Writing Directors 179, 182 (2006).

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 50, 92.

Kansas v. Colorado , 206 U.S. 46, 97 (1907).

111 N.E. 1050 (N.Y. 1916); see Schnee, supra note 137, at 113.

MacPherson , 111 N.E. at 1051.

Id . at 1055 (commenting that “defendant was not absolved from a duty of inspection” because it bought the wheels from a third party manufacturer); Schnee, supra note 137, at 113.

Id. at 1055 (Bartlett, J., dissenting) (opining that the majority’s opinion extended vendor liability further than any case the court previously approved).

Id. at 1051—53 (majority opinion); Schnee, supra note 137, at 113.

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 100—01.

MacPherson , 111 N.E. at 1055.

Schnee, supra note 137, at 113.

See Aldisert , supra note 16, at 91 (“Inductive generalization is used in all aspects of the legal profession – in studying law, in practicing law and in judging cases. Thus, it looms large in the common-law tradition in the development of legal precepts in the case by case experience.”).

Ross, supra note 140, at 185 (“Typically, deductive reasoning proceeds from a general proposition to a conclusion that is either a particular proposition or another general proposition.”).

Kristen K. Robbins, Paradigm Lost: Recapturing Classical Rhetoric to Validate Legal Reasoning , 27 Vt. L. Rev . 483, 532 (2003).

Bruce Weinstein, How Trump and Friends Could Learn a Few Things From Mr. Spock , Fortune Magazine Online (March 8, 2016), http://fortune.com/2016/03/08/fallacious-arguments-logic-trump/ (discussing fallacies in recent presidential campaign speeches).

Consider some pop-culture examples of blatant fallacy: Advertisements in the “Four out of five dentists approve” variety (demonstrating appeal to authority fallacy); talking head debates over whether ISIS militants are or are not “genuine Muslims” (no true Scotsman fallacy); political candidates stating their opponents are in the pocket of special interests, hate the middle class, are socialist, are racist, etc. (ad hominem argument); arguments against the theory of evolution using a picture of a chimpanzee and asking, “Is this really your ancestor?” (straw-man fallacy).

Indeed, use of fallacy is so prevalent that television and commercial writers have found it a ripe target for satire: A Simpsons episode where Homer concludes that a rock is capable of repelling tigers because, while the rock was present, no tigers were about ( post hoc fallacy), Simpson- I want to buy your rock , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3U6IUMTDHY (last visited Sept. 28, 2017); a Direct TV commercial suggesting, “Don’t wake up in a roadside ditch: Get rid of cable” (slippery slope fallacy).

Rice, supra note 100, at 79—80.

Id . at 82.

Id. at 82—83.

Ross, supra note 140, at 189 (“Formal fallacies are based on a mistake in the form or logic of the argument.”).

Aldisert, supra note 16, at 141.

Aldisert , supra note 16, at 143.

Cory S. Clements, Perception and Persuasion in Legal Argumentation: Using Informal Fallacies and Cognitive Biases to Win the War of Words , 2013 BYU L. Rev . 319, 332 (2013).

LOGICALLY FALLACIOUS: THE ULTIMATE COLLECTION OF OVER 300 LOGICAL FALLACIES , https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFallacies (last visited Sept. 28, 2017).

Michael Sean Quinn, “Scholarly Ethics”: A Response , 46 J. Legal Educ. 110, 112 (1996).

375 Fed. App’x 154, 157 (2d Cir. 2010) (unpublished).

375 F. App’x at 156 n.2.

Scheck v. Burger King Corp ., 798 F. Supp. 692, 698 n10 (S.D. Fla. 1992).

Aldisert , supra note 16, at 208.

Id. at 193.

Id . at 195.

807 F. Supp. 1376 (C.D. Ill. 1992).

Id . at 1391.

Aldisert , supra note 16, at 199.

Eugene Volokh, The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope , 116 Harv. L. Rev . 1026, 1102 (2003)

See State v. Brown , 305 P.3d 48 (Kan. App. 2013).

See generally Neal R. Feigenson, The Rhetoric of Torts: How Advocates Help Jurors Think About Causation, Reasonableness, and Responsibility , 47 Hastings L.J. 61, 165 n 154 (1995).

Gabriel H. Teninbaum, Reductio Ad Hitlerum: Trumping the Judicial Nazi Card , 2009 Mich. St. L. Rev. 541, 554 (2009)

Weinstein, supra note 155.

Doing so would be “like asking them to design a rocket without teaching them the rules of physics.” Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 2.

Id . at 6. Judge Aldisert describes the prosecutor’s syllogism as a useful template for most legal problems:

Major premise: [Doing something] [violates the law] Minor premise: [The defendant] [did something] Conclusion: [The defendant] [violated the law].

A basic categorical syllogism.

A modus tollens conditional syllogism.

Aldisert , supra note 16, at 195.

“The more times a network is stimulated, the stronger and more efficient it becomes.” Bernard J. Luskin, “If I Had a Better Brain!” Brain Health, Plasticity, Media, and Learning Can be a Perfect Storm , Psychology Today (Aug. 20, 2013), https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-media-psychology-effect/201308/if-i-had-better-brain (last visited Dec. 12, 2017).

See Michael Hunter Schwartz, Teaching Law by Design: How Learning Theory and Instructional Design Can Inform and Reform Law Teaching , 38 San Diego L. Rev . 347, 360 (2001) (law schools’ emphasis on scholarship and publication, the criteria by which law schools measure professors’ performance for tenure purposes, discourages teaching innovation); Samantha A. Moppett, Control-Alt-Incomplete? Using Technology to Assess “Digital Natives” , 12 Chi.-Kent J. Intell. Prop . 77, 86 (2013) (law professors fear change because of concern about academic freedom, resistance to changing status quo, and hesitation over increasing workload).

The Case Law method, introduced by Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard Law School in 1870, has been commonly labeled the “Socratic Method.” This is, somewhat, a misnomer. Ruta K. Stropus, Mend It, Bend It, and Extend It: The Fate of Traditional Law School Methodology in the 21st Century , 27 Loy. U. Chi. L.J. 449, 453 (1996) (“Unlike Socrates, who focused purely on the questioning process, Langdell sought to combine both the substance of the law and the process of the law into the legal classroom.”) Despite this technical difference, I refer to the typical law-school instructional method as “Socratic.”

See, e.g., William M. Sullivan et al., educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law 56—60, 75—78 (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Preparation for the Professions Program, 2007); A.B.A. Section of Legal Educ. & Admissions to the Bar , Legal Education and Professional Development–an Educational Continuum, Report of The Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap 233—36 (1992) [MacCrate Report].

Tiscione, supra note 4, at 399—400

Niedwiecki, supra note 89, at 168.

Id. at 169.

See generally Jennifer L. Rosato, The Socratic Method and Women Law Students: Humanize, Don’t Feminize , 7 S. Cal. Rev. L. & Women’s Stud. 37 (1997) (discussing students’ humiliation as an integral part of the Socratic Method).

Timothy R. Zinnecker, Syllogisms, Enthymemes and Fallacies: Mastering Secured Transactions Through Deductive Reasoning , 56 Wayne L. Rev. 1581, 1589 (2010) (quoting James M. Boland, Legal Writing Programs and Professionalism: Legal Writing Professors Can Join the Academic Club , 18 St. Thomas L. Rev. 711, 726 (2006)).

State v. Smith , 969 So. 2d 452, 453 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2007).

Id. at 454.

I am indebted to my colleague, Professor Brendan Beery, for this pragmatic and tested approach for using conditional syllogisms to promote what he terms “right thinking.” Professor Beery conducts voluntary logic workshops that not only teach the syllogistic process using functional terminology, but which enhance students’ ability to express their reasoning on exams.

See generally Kevin H. Smith, Practical Jurisprudence: Deconstructing and Synthesizing the Art and Science of Thinking Like a Lawyer , 29 U. Mem. L. Rev . 1, 49 (1998).

Carol McCrehan Parker, Writing Throughout the Curriculum: Why Law Schools Need It and How to Achieve It , 76 Neb. L. Rev . 561, 571 (1997).

Viator, supra note 1, at 742.

David S. Romantz, The Truth About Cats and Dogs: Legal Writing Courses and the Law School Curriculum , 52 U. Kan. L. Rev. 105, 139 (2003).

Schnee, supra note 137, at 106.

Laura P. Graham, Why-Rac? Revisiting the Traditional Paradigm for Writing About Legal Analysis , 63 U. Kan. L. Rev. 681, 688 (2015) (citing Kristin Konrad Robbins-Tiscione, Rhetoric for Legal Writers: The Theory and Practice of Analysis and Persuasion 111—13 (2009)).

See generally Jane Kent Gionfriddo, Thinking Like A Lawyer: The Heuristics of Case Synthesis , 40 Tex. Tech L. Rev . 1 (2007).

But see Terrill Pollman, Building A Tower of Babel or Building A Discipline? Talking About Legal Writing , 85 Marq. L. Rev. 887, 924–25 (2002) (discussing the need for consistent legal-writing terminology, or “jargon,” to effectively communicate about writing and about the substance of the academic discipline of legal writing).

Some writing texts already approach legal analysis using logic terminology. See generally Deborah A. Schmedemann & Christina L. Kunz , Synthesis: Legal Reading, Reasoning, and Writing (3d ed. 2007); Teresa J. Reid Rambo & Leanne J. Pflaum, Legal Writing by Design (2d ed. 2013).

See Laurel Currie Oates & Anne Enquist , Just Memos (3d ed. 2011).

Predictive writing is nearly always taught before persuasive writing. Kathy Stanchi, Teaching Students to Present Law Persuasively Using Techniques From Psychology , 19 Perspectives: Teaching Legal Res. & Writing 142, 142 (2011).

See, e.g ., Dan Hunter, Teaching and Using Analogy in Law , 2 J. Ass’n. Legal Writing Directors 151, 151 (2004).

Cass R. Sunstein, On Analogical Reasoning , 106 Harv. L. Rev. 741, 745 (1993).

Ross, supra note 140, at 180.

Fla. Stat. § 877.03 (2016).

C.L.B. v. State , 689 So. 2d 1171, 1172 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1997).

Wiltzer v. State, 756 So. 2d 1063, 1065 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2000).

W.M. v. State, 491 So. 2d 335, 336 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1986).

Fields v. State, 24 So. 3d 646, 648 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2009).

See Aldisert et al., supra note 18, at 12.

“If the analysis is based on a complete set, then the conclusion will be strong. But if a complete set is not used for the analysis, the conclusion may be weak. The advocate must test the strength of the conclusion by examining the sample’s size and its representativeness.” Ross, supra note 140, at 181.

Dan Hunter, Reason Is Too Large: Analogy and Precedent in Law , 50 Emory L.J. 1197, 1246 (2001).

In reality, Fla. Stat. § 877.03 provides one concrete example of disorderly conduct: “brawling or fighting.” However, in a “closed universe” memo, that part of the statute can be left out for pedagogical purposes.

Aldisert , supra note 16, at 93.

Developing Critical Thinking Through the Study of Law

By major taren wellman, assistant professor, u.s. air force academy, break it down to build it up.

A Practical Approach to Develop Critical Thinking

For better or worse, the military has a reputation for breaking people down before building them back up.  The military throws recruits into immersive training programs with the end goal of replacing many individual tendencies, assumptions, and behaviors with the professional and technical skills needed to perform their jobs.  Good critical thinking [1] is a trait desired by business leaders [2] and military commanders alike [3] .  But, a gap often exists between what industry needs and what higher education produces for the work force. [4]   Educators are on the front lines of bridging this gap.   

Fig. 1.  Critical thinking’s

“micro-skills” TO DEVELOP Analogical reasoning AND ADVOCACY ¥

• Identify issue(s) in need of solving.
• Seek and summarize relevant information.
• Synthesize information from separate sources.
• Identify assumptions and deficient information.
• Evaluate the strength of an interpretation or argument.
• Evaluate how strongly a relationship or analogy supports a claim.
• Develop alternative explanations.
• Distinguish reasonable from unreasonable inferences.
• Select and apply an appropriate process to develop solutions.
• Evaluate suitable solutions to a problem.
• Explain the best solution.
• Describe how changes to the problem or assumptions may affect the solution.
• Counter anticipated alternative solutions or arguments.

¥ See note 11.

Perhaps ironically, inspiration can be drawn from this “break it down” approach in the development of critical thinking.  By identifying subskills for critical thinking and designing activities to intentionally practice these subskills, immersing students in an environment that routinely practices and requires the essential skills of critical thinking can replace more shallow habits of thought.  By breaking down the skill of critical thinking into smaller, more manageable parts and designing activities to intentionally practice the parts, educators can make real progress in producing more creative problem-solvers and deep thinkers in and out of the classroom. [5]

Critical thinking as a whole is often assessed by being broken into essential sub-skills. [6]   While overlap may exist among the varying discrete skills tested, the exact complement of skills and phrasing varies. [7]   Not all sub-skills collections are created equal—some are more easily understood and put into practice than others.  The important point for educators is that critical thinking is developed by selecting a set of critical thinking sub-skills most applicable to one’s discipline, and then explicitly communicating and reinforcing those skills for students. [8]   In order to maximize applicability to the particular discipline of law, in which analogical reasoning [9] and advocacy is paramount, I have modified one such complement of sub-skills [10] to create the thirteen essential “micro-skills” shown at Figure 1. [11]  

Each of these micro-skills is unique and can be strengthened when specifically targeted and practiced.  The challenge for educators is to design activities and assessments that require students to practice the particular sub-skills of their discipline.  When regularly practiced through activities in the context of the course’s objectives, the overall goal of building better critical thinkers becomes much more natural and manageable than it may initially seem. [12]   The purpose of this article is to provide examples of small, [13] practical steps employed in an undergraduate, core law classroom to iterate the skills that together form robust critical thinking, particularly in the areas of analogical reasoning and advocacy.  While some of these are specific to the law discipline, we believe that analogous examples for other disciplines can fairly easily be created from the ones we share here.

Critical Thinking’s Critical parts

Identify Your Discipline’s Micro-skills to Practice  

While broad definitions of critical thinking vary widely [14] , themes emerge from the varying literature of skills and competencies that combine to form the broader concept of critical thinking. [15]   Generally, these skills are grouped into categories that include evaluating information, self-aware and reflective reasoning, creative thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, and effective communication. [16]   The categories describe habits of inquiry and analysis that serve students well when applied to new and changing contexts in both an academic setting and real world problems. [17]

The thirteen “micro-skills” identified above in Figure 1 were developed by starting with a validated [18] complement of subskills, then were gently modified to maximize applicability to the particular field of law.  For example, the CAT sub-skill of “identifying additional information needed to evaluate a hypothesis/interpretation” was simplified to merely “identifying deficient information”—a condition which naturally exists in trial where perfect information is always lacking but in which the scientific term hypothesis is rarely used.  Additionally, sub-skills which are used infrequently in the field of law were omitted, such as “using basic mathematical skills” and “determine whether an invited inference in an advertisement is supported by information.”  The terminology of sub-skills can be modified, of course, to maximize application in any field of study.  The order of sub-skills matters and should be matched to the particular field as well.  They should be intentionally sequenced to typify a problem-solving methodology within the discipline.  The “micro-skills” sequence developed here generally entails progressing through problem-defining (#1), fact-finding (#2-4), idea-finding and evaluation (#5-8), and solution-finding (#9-13). 

Within a particular course, students should be provided with multiple, varying opportunities to practice the essential micro-skills, and then reinforced and improved through skill-oriented feedback.    Repetition combined with well-designed assessments and feedback lead to student growth in the areas practiced. [19]   Even if courses vary in their particular selection, phrasing, and order of micro-skills, consistent practice and feedback across multiple courses will reinforce broader critical thinking habits and skill categories.

The discipline of law is ripe for micro-skill repetition.  Law is studied through reading cases—typically a judge’s opinion solving a controversy between two parties in a proceeding.  Many, if not all, of the thirteen micro-skills often appear in sequence in a court’s written opinion.  By dissecting cases, students learn to identify the relevant (or necessary) facts on which a case depends, deduce the rules that emerge from legal precedent, and see how courts select and apply those rules in new contexts.  New law is created by the parties applying and advocating particular lines of analogical reasoning.  As such, the discipline of law is a natural fit for practicing the particular critical thinking micro-skills of Figure 1 in nearly every reading and assignment. 

In law, the problem-finding, fact-finding, idea-finding, and solution-finding process is captured by the universally-utilized “FIRAC” model. [20]   FIRAC, which stands for Fact, Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion, is the necessary components of every fully developed legal opinion, motion or court filing.  The model captures the relevant information from the controversy, informs which rule(s) apply, and demonstrates the reasoning as to how the rules are applied to solve the problem.  The model can be applied to nearly every assignment in the study of law because it represents a method of organizing thought that is widely accepted in legal writing and oral advocacy.  It is through the lens of this model that law professors are able to exercise creativity in further developing the essential micro-skills by presenting a wide variety of assignments for students.  Whether students identify the FIRAC components of the cases they read, rewrite an opinion in the FIRAC format, or develop a legal argument by delivering an opinion or brief, the model and micro-skills permeate the pedagogy.  Some of our courses’ specific implementation methods of the FIRAC model are further explained below to demonstrate implementation.  A similar model can be utilized in any discipline to aid the iteration of the discipline’s particular micro-skills. [21]

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Critical thinking and the law.

J.P. "Sandy" Ogilvy , The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law Follow Dannye Holley

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This article traces the origins, and discusses key features of the Critical Thinking and the Law Program. In addition, this article evaluates and projects the implications of the Critical Thinking and the Law Program for legal education. The first section of the article reviews the rich literature on the teaching of thinking movement, and focuses upon those elements of the movement which have had the greatest influence on the design and execution of the Critical Thinking and the Law Program. This section also reports the findings of a survey formulated to determine the current involvement of North American law schools with the teaching of thinking/critical thinking movement. The second section of the article describes the crucial elements of the program and the specific influences of the critical thinking movement on those elements. Section two concludes by discussing the program’s evaluation plan, including the results of the two types of empirical evaluation in the program.

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J.P. "Sandy" Ogilvy & Dannye Holley, Critical Thinking and the Law, 1 INT’L J. LEGAL PROF. 343 (1994).

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Critical Thinking Inside Law Schools: An Outline

The intention of this work is to do the mapping of the many problems that critical thinking (CT) is confronted with in the inside of law schools, taking these in their institutional role as well as tangible manifestations of legal culture. I address the significance of CT, reflecting on its philosophical origins and its possibility in our time, a time that is marked by a crisis of paradigms. We will move from theory to a more pragmatic approach based on skills, only to find different sets of difficulties. Today’s higher education institutional learning tradition is characterised by the conception and implementation of reforms which, in turn, are dominated by notions of business and commercial ethics, that are adding up to the positivist predominance that is still reigning upon legal education.Este trabajo pretende realizar una descripcion de los numerosos problemas con que se encuentra el pensamiento critico (PC) dentro de las escuelas de derecho, entendidas desde su papel instituci...

Related Papers

Peter Burdon , Gabrielle Appleby , Alex Reilly

The authors map the history of important changes in Australian legal education over the past 20 years, with a focus on the influence of the profession on legal education. Using Thornton's account of contemporary law schools 'jettisoning the critical' in the quest for market success as a stepping off point, they put forward a vision of what a legal education with a rich focus on critical thinking might look like. Their writing is motivated by and describes particular experiences in a particular law school. They ask where spaces for critical pedagogy might be created and argue that even in the context of current constraints it is possible for legal academics to teach in ways that are consonant with their values and pedagogical philosophies. They then set out some of the ways they are seeking to undertake this project in the environments in which they teach, in both elective and compulsory courses.

In a series of publications over the last decade, Australian National University Professor Margaret Thornton has documented a disturbing change in the nature of legal education. This body of work culminates in a recently published book based on interviews with 145 legal academics in Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada. In it, Thornton describes a feeling of widespread unease among legal academics that society, government, university administrators and students themselves are moving away from viewing legal education as a public good which benefits both students and society. Instead, legal education is increasingly being viewed as a purely private good, for consumption by the student in the quest for individual career enhancement. Whilst Thornton’s work thoroughly describes what she calls the ‘neoliberal turn’ in law school education, less is said about appropriate and available strategies that academics might take to reassert the public value of legal education. In this article, we focus on the teaching of critical thinking as a means by which this public value might be reasserted.

Journal of Legal Studies Education

Neil Browne

Joel M Modiri

South African legal education remains trapped "at the centre of the knot" which is to say it is fundamentally disconnected from its social context and thus largely unable to grapple with the complex political and intellectual predicaments of post-1994 South Africa. This article reiterates arguments made previously concerning the need for a critical legal education that produces lawyers who are not only technically and professionally competent but also socially, politically and intellectually engaged. Three particularly significant themes for engagement in critical legal education are identified as firstly, the turn to a subversive approach to law; secondly, the problematisation of constitutional fetishism; and thirdly, the decolonisation of knowledge and legal knowledge in particular. Paulo Freire's insights on critical pedagogy are also considered as they disclose an alternative view of legal education linked to social justice, liberation and critical self-reflection. This argument for a renewal of legal education is then further extended to a critical analysis of the current Council on Higher Education's review of the standard of the LLB degree. What emerges throughout is the search for not only a higher education but also a deeper education, one that prepares law students for what is an ethically and politically complicated world. Teaching law critically in this time and space demands nothing less.

The Law Teacher

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Legal Education Review

Allan Ardill

This article engages with a body of literature concerned with the demise of critique in Australian legal education. In particular it reflects on Thornton’s, Privatising the Public University: The Case of Law, a recent special issue of this Journal, ‘The Past, Present and Future of Critical Legal Education in Australia’ (2013) 23(2), and several articles by James on competing legal education discourses published between 2000 and 2013. This reflection narrates the story of the survival and consolidation of a deeply critical legal core course against the tide of corporatism, vocationalism and doctrinalism that have cemented their dominance in law schools since the 1990s as part of the neo-Liberal turn afflicting tertiary education. It concludes that the future of deep legal critique depends on a commitment to embed it across the LLB curriculum and to the extent students are persuaded to see it as relevant.

Tim Bunjevac

Recent shifts towards greater student diversity in legal education have had important consequences for the practice of teaching law. Law lecturers are no longer expected to serve as mere 'repositories of legal knowledge', but also as pro-active participants in their students' learning processes. This paper highlights the importance of modern educational theories of learning to the practice of teaching law, because it is now widely accepted that the more engaging, student-centred teaching approaches can be used effectively to enhance the student learning experience. The author describes how a student-centred pedagogical approach works in practice by reference to recent teaching initiatives for junior academics at Victoria University Law School, which demonstrate the importance of practising 'reflective thinking' and the use of a range of modern learning design approaches.

José Rodrigo Rodriguez

Journal for Juridical Science

Elizabeth Snyman-Van Deventer

The aim of this note is to focus on legal analysis as an important skill that law students must learn, in order to be effective lawyers who possess the ability to think critically. The note starts with a list of different methods of legal analysis to give a very broad overview of methods from which not only an individual lecturer, but also a law faculty as a whole, can choose when deciding on teaching legal analysis. The note also aims to examine the different elements of the methods of legal analysis and organisation that need to be taught to South African law students to ensure that they learn to conduct proper legal analysis. From the literature, it is clear that, in the United States of America, legal analysis is most often taught as part of legal writing, but it is also stated that it should form part of doctrinal subjects. This note proposes that this dual approach be followed in the South African LLB. As there is limited research in South Africa on teaching legal analysis, this note aims to provide a South African perspective based on the considerable body of research on this issue in the United States of America.

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Critical Legal Studies

You are welcome here, researching in the harvard law school library, critical race theory, latina/o/x critical theory (latcrit), asian critical theory (asiancrit), critical indigenous studies, critical whiteness studies, feminist legal theory, queer legal theory, critical disability studies, intersectionality, critical discourse analysis, critical legal history, additional resources, getting help, introducing this guide.

This is a guide to critical legal studies research in the Harvard Law School Library.  It is organized as follows:

• A discussion of critical librarianship and bias in libraries.
• Using the Harvard Library's HOLLIS library catalog.
• A historical overview of critical legal studies. 
• Topical overviews of areas within the discipline.

A brief introductory video on how to best use this guide is provided below.

Neutrality, Bias, and Identities

It is a common misconception that libraries and library catalogs are neutral and unbiased.  They are not.

This research guide was created to help researchers effectively navigate the Harvard Library collections for critical legal studies research.  Bibliographic indexing terms used in libraries today were created within a historically white hegemonic information infrastructure. 

The author of this guide acknowledges, and regrets, that research in this area may require the use of language that is othering, objectionable, triggering, and/or offensive to people of many backgrounds, identities, identifications, and presentations.  

The author of this guide identifies as a white cisgender woman.

Learn More:

• Bias and Neutrality in Libraries
• Black Excellence in LIS Syllabus
• Introduction to Law Librarianship: Critical Legal Studies The author of this guide wrote the chapter on Critical Legal Studies for the open-source textbook Introduction to Law Librarianship, published in 2021. This chapter discusses critical studies and their manifestations in librarianship and law. It provides law librarians with a framework for thinking critically about law libraries and encourages them to center equity, compassion, and justice in their practice of law librarianship.
• Writing About "Slavery"? This Might Help Critical guide to language related to slavery and enslaved people, community-sourced by senior slavery scholars of color.

Using the Harvard Library Catalog, HOLLIS

The Harvard Library online catalog  HOLLIS ( https://hollis.harvard.edu )  provides information about materials in the Harvard libraries' collections. There are several different types of keywords that you can use when you are searching HOLLIS:

• Place of Publication
• ISBN or ISSN (unique identifying number for a book or a series)

Another search field is Subject , which includes words and phrases selected by cataloging librarians from a controlled vocabulary like the  Library of Congress Subject Headings ( LCSH) list .  

Note: Searching by subject can be helpful in limiting results to highly relevant materials. However, as mentioned previously, many researchers will find some LCSH terms profoundly offensive and othering.  Regrettably, some HOLLIS searches listed in this guide include terms of this nature.

When you do a Keyword Anywhere  search in HOLLIS, the entire record is searched, including all the fields listed above.

This guide provides links to pre-populated HOLLIS Keywhere Anywhere  searches under each topic, which look like this:

These searches are meant to be very broad. To limit the results, edit the search by adding additional keywords, and/or use the filtering options on the right side of the HOLLIS search results screen.

The guide also includes links to HOLLIS searches by book series.  Academic publishers often publish like-themed books under a descriptive series name.  Book series searches in this guide look like this (where "Routledge" is the name of the publisher):

A HOLLIS user guide , created and maintained by the Harvard Library, is available at  https://guides.library.harvard.edu/hollishelp .

Critical Legal Studies: Definition and History

Critical theory involves challenging the status quo through intellectual analysis. 

What do critical theorists do?

• They think about how to deal with new problems and explore emerging possibilities that "arise from changing historical circumstances." 
• They worry about societal disinclination for deep and ethical thinking
• They decry a lack of  "meaning and purpose" in modern life. 
• Through their work, they address power imbalances in the economy, in the government, or in law, as a way of reducing oppression and fostering resistance to forces that inhibit freedom for everyone.

(Source: Stephen Eric Bronner, Critical Theory: A Very Short Introduction (2017 2nd ed.))

What does it mean to refer to legal studies as "critical"?  According to  Professor Lolita Buckner Inniss , a leading critical legal studies scholar:

"'Critical' in this sense refers to closely inquiring into the nature of a thing or idea, not necessarily to alter it or to undermine it, but rather to problematize it, that is, to expose vital questions and problems about a thing or concept."

Professor Buckner Inniss posits that "critical" studies feature the following characteristics:

• A problem-solving methodology that is "interdisciplinary, intersectional, (and) spectral"; 
• The non-adoption of "claims of universal validity" except where such adoption is "only to achieve a greater good for the many or to undermine structures of oppression"; and
• The rejection of "false dichotomies" and the recognition that, among multiple alternatives, there may be many "valid choices."

( Source: Lolita Buckner Inniss, "Other Spaces" in Legal Pedagogy , 28 Harv. J. Racial & Ethnic Just. 67, 68 (2012) ).

History of Critical Legal Studies: Selected Books

• The Critical Lawyer's Handbook by Ian Grigg-Spall and Paddy Ireland Publication Date: 1992
• Critical Legal Studies by Allan C. Hutchinson (ed.) Publication Date: 1989
• The Critical Legal Studies Movement: Another Time, A Greater Task by Roberto Unger Publication Date: 2015
• Ethnic Dilemmas, 1964-1982 by Nathan Glazer Publication Date: 1983
• Equality Under the Constitution: Reclaiming the Fourteenth Amendment by Judith Baer Publication Date: 1983
• A Guide to Critical Legal Studies by Mark Kelman Publication Date: 1988
• Ideology and Community in the First Wave of Critical Legal Studies by Richard Bauman Publication Date: 2002
• Lawyers' Ethics and the Pursuit of Social Justice: A Critical Reader by Susan Carle (ed.) Publication Date: 2005
• Legal Modernism by David Luban Publication Date: 1994
• The Lizard by Duncan Kennedy (ed.) Publication Date: 1984 Issued during the meeting of the American Association of Law Schools, San Francisco, Jan. 1984.
• The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique by David Kairys (ed.) Publication Date: 1982 (1st ed.)
• The Transformation of American Law, 1870-1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy by Morton Horwitz Publication Date: 1992

History of Critical Legal Studies: Selected Journal Articles

In 1982, a Critical Legal Studies symposium was held at Stanford Law School.  The symposium issue published by the Stanford Law Review ( Critical Legal Studies Symposium of 1982, Stanford Law Review, v. 36 (1984) ) includes many articles that are often cited as fundamental works of the movement.

Key concepts from these articles, which may be helpful as search terms for further research, include "trashing," "deconstructionism," "utopianism," and "post-realism."

• 'Round and 'Round the Bramble Bush: From Legal Realism to Critical Legal Scholarship Note, Harvard Law Review, v. 95, p. 1669 (1982).
• A Bibliography of Critical Legal Studies Duncan Kennedy and Karl E. Klare, Yale Law Journal, v. 94, p. 435 (1984).
• Critical Legal Studies: A Political History Mark Tushnet, Yale Law Journal, v. 100, p. 1515 (1991).
• Critical Legal Studies: An Introduction to its Origins and Underpinnings Mark Tushnet, Journal of Legal Education, v. 36, p. 505 (1986)
• Deconstructing Legal Research: A Law Librarian's Commentary on Critical Legal Studies Steven M. Barkan, Law Library Journal, v. 79, p. 617 (1987).
• Law School Enters the Matrix: Teaching Critical Legal Studies Jerry L. Anderson, Journal of Legal Education, v. 54 (2004).
• Legal Education and the Reproduction of the Hierarchy Duncan Kennedy, Journal of Legal Education, v. 32, p. 591 (1982).
• The Literature of American Legal History, Volume 1, Chapter 116: 1981-1984 William E. Nelson (1985).
• Minority Critiques of the Critical Legal Studies Movement Symposium Issue, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Spring 1987
• Notes Toward an Intimate, Opinionated, and Affectionate History of the Conference on Critical Legal Studies John Henry Schlegel, Stanford Law Review, v. 36 (1984)
• Of Lizards, Intersubjective Zap, and Trashing: Critical Legal Studies and the Librarian Virginia Wise, Legal Reference Services Quarterly, v. 8, p. 7 (1988). Includes a bibliography of readings published through 1988.
• On Critical Legal Studies Sanford Levinson, Dissent, v. 36(3), p. 360 (July 1989).
• Taking Rights Aggressively: The Perils and Promise of Critical Legal Theory for Peoples of Color Robert A. Williams, Jr., Law and Inequality, v. 5, p. 103 (1987).
• The Theory of Critical Legal Studies Alan Hunt, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, v. 6, no. 1, p. 1 (1986)
• Toward a Black Legal Scholarship: Race and Original Understandings Jerome McCristal Culp, Jr., Duke Law Journal (1991).
• Unfreezing Legal Reality: Critical Approaches to Law Robert W. Gordon, Florida State University Law Review, v. 15, p. 195 (1987).
• Why Do We Tell The Same Stories?: Law Reform, Critical Librarianship, and the Triple Helix Dilemma Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, Stanford Law Review, v. 42, p. 207 (1989).

in 1995, Professor Derrick Bell , the first tenured African-American faculty member at Harvard Law School, defined critical race theory as "a body of legal scholarship, the majority of whose authors are both existentially people of color and ideologically committed to the struggle against racism, particularly as institutionalized in and by law."  According to Professor Bell, there are also white critical race theory scholars, and they are "usually committed to the overthrow of their own racial privilege."

As a way of distinguishing critical race theory specifically from critical legal studies generally, Professor Bell emphasized that the former relies on giving space and power to the narratives of Black people who are oppressed by the legal system, and using those narratives to "empower and include traditionally excluded views" in order to resist "standards and institutions created by and fortifying white power."  He characterized this method as "transformative resistance strategy" that makes use of not only the critical device established by critical legal studies scholars, but also the civil rights movement's goals of resistance to and liberation from white supremacy.

(Source: Derrick A. Bell, Who's Afraid of Critical Race Theory , 1995 U. Ill. L. Rev. 893.)

Professor Bell's work laid the foundation for the scholarly discipline of critical race theory.  During his career, he worked as a lawyer for the NAACP and also served as a professor at the University of Oregon School of Law and at NYU School of Law.   He passed away in 2011 .

Critical Race Theory: HOLLIS Catalog Searches

• HOLLIS: "Affirmative Action" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "African American Lawyers"
• HOLLIS: "African Americans -- Civil Rights"
• HOLLIS: "African Americans -- Legal Status, Laws, Etc."
• HOLLIS: "African Americans -- Suffrage"
• HOLLIS: "Black Codes" OR "Black Laws"
• HOLLIS: "Black Lives Matter" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Black Nationalism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Black Studies" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Act of 1866"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Act of 1875"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Act of 1957"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Act of 1960"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Act of 1964"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Act of 1968"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Rights Movements" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Crime and Race"
• HOLLIS: "Critical Race Theory"
• HOLLIS: "Deconstructionist" AND "Law OR Legal" AND "Race OR Racial"
• HOLLIS: "Fifteenth Amendment"
• HOLLIS: "Fourteenth Amendment"
• HOLLIS: "Freed Persons" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Guardianship of the Nation"
• HOLLIS: "Jim Crow" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Juneteenth" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "National Association for the Advancement of Colored People"
• HOLLIS: "Post-Racialism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Prosecutors" AND "Race OR Racial"
• HOLLIS: "Race Discrimination" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Race OR Racial" AND "Justice"
• HOLLIS: "Race OR Racial OR Racism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Racial Inequality" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Racialized" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Racial Minorities" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Racism -- Remedies"
• HOLLIS: "Second Reconstruction" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Slaves -- Legal Status, Laws, Etc."
• HOLLIS: "Systemic Racism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Thirteenth Amendment"
• HOLLIS: "Voting Rights Act of 1965"

Critical Race Theory: Selected Books

• And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice by Derrick Bell Publication Date: 1989
• Charleston Syllabus: Readings on Race, Racism, and Racial Violence by Chad Williams, Kidada E. Williams, and Keisha N. Blain (eds.) Publication Date: 2016
• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America by Khalil Gibran Muhammad Publication Date: 2019
• Critical Race Theory: An Introduction by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic Publication Date: 2017 (3rd ed.)
• Critical Race Theory: A Primer by Khiara M. Bridges Publication Date: 2019
• Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement by Kimberle Crenshaw et al. (eds.) Publication Date: 1995
• Crossraods, Directions, and a New Critical Race Theory by Francisco Valdes, Jerome McCristal Culp, and Angela P. Harris (eds.) Publication Date: 2002
• The Derrick Bell Reader by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic Publication Date: 2005
• The Origins of African-American Interests in International Law by Henry J. Richardson, III Publication Date: 2008
• Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment by Angela J. Davis (ed.) Publication Date: 2017
• Race, Ethnicity, and Law by Mathieu Deflem (ed.) Publication Date: 2017
• Race, Racism, and American Law (Casebook) by Derrick Bell Publication Date: 2008 (6th ed.)
• Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History by Annette Gordon-Reed (ed.) Publication Date: 2002
• Representing the Race: The Creation of the Civil Rights Lawyer by Kenneth W. Mack Publication Date: 2012
• The U.S. Supreme Court and Racial Minorities: Two Centuries of Judicial Review on Trial by Leslie Goldstein Publication Date: 2017

Critical Race Theory: Other Materials

• African American Biographical Database (AABD) (Database)
• African American Periodicals, 1825-1995 (Database)
• Black Abolitionist Papers (Database)
• The Black Scholar (Journal)
• Black Studies Research Sources (Microform Collection) University Publications of America / LexisNexis
• Black Thought and Culture (Research Collection)
• Charles Hamilton Houston Institute Series on Race and Justice (Book Series) NYU Press
• Contemporary Black History (Book Series) Palgrave Macmillan
• The Crisis (Journal)
• Critical Black Studies (Book Series) Palgrave Macmillan
• Critical Perspectives on Race, Crime, and Justice (Book Series) Lexington Books
• Critical Race Theory (Book Series) Garland Press
• Ebony (Monthly Periodical)
• Focus: Black America Bibliography Series (Book Series) Indiana University Libraries
• Georgetown Journal of Law & Modern Critical Race Perspectives
• Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal
• The History Makers (Oral History Digital Archive)
• Journal of African American History
• Journal of Black Studies
• Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice
• Michigan Journal of Race and the Law
• NAACP Papers (Database)
• National Black Law Journal
• New Racial Studies (Book Series) Routledge
• Oxford African American Studies Center (Research Collection)
• Philosophy and Race (Book Series) State University of New York Press
• Politics of Race and Ethnicity (Book Series) University of Michigan Press
• Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (Book Series) University of Virginia Press
• Race, Law, and American History (Book Series) Garland Press
• Race, Rhetoric, and the Media (Book Series) University of Mississippi Press
• Rutgers Race and the Law Review
• Signs of Race (Book Series) Palgrave Macmillan
• Slavery, Abolition, and Social Justice (Research Collection)
• Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society
• University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

According to Professor Francisco Valdes (University of Miami School of Law) , Latina/o/x Critical Theory (LatCrit) explores the "(p)ractices and the (p)ossibilities that (are) associate(d) with Latinas/os and critical legal scholarship on race, ethnicity, and other sources of subordination in American law and society." 

The group itself, according to Professor Valdes, "a conglomeration of several peoples from varied cultures and localities(.) ... These group experiences include, but are not exclusively about, Mexican-American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban-American communities ... (representing) diverse spectrums of races, religions, genders, classes, and sexualities."

(Source: Francisco Valdes,  Latina/o Ethnicities, Critical Race Theory, and Post-Identity Politics in Postmodern Legal Culture: From Practices to Possibilites: Forward , 9 La Raza L.J. 1, 8, 11 (1996) (Colloquium Proceedings).)

LatCrit: HOLLIS Searches

• HOLLIS: "Chicano OR Chicana OR Chicano/a" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hispanic" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "La Raza" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Latcrit" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "LatCrit Conference"
• HOLLIS: "Latin American" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Latino OR Latina OR Latino/a OR Latinx" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Mestizo OR Mestiza OR Mestizo/a" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund"
• HOLLIS: "Si Se Puede" AND "Law OR Legal"

LatCrit: Selected Books

• Gringo Injustice: Insider Perspective on Police, Gangs, and Law by Alfredo Mirandé (ed.) Publication Date: 2020
• Key Terms in Latino/a Cultural and Literary Studies by Paul Allatson Publication Date: 2007
• Latina/o Studies by Ronald L. Mize Publication Date: 2018
• The Latino/a Condition: A Critical Reader by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic Publication Date: 2011 (2nd ed.)
• Latino/a Rights and Justice in the United States: Perspectives and Approaches by José Luis Morín Publication Date: 2009 (2nd ed.)
• Latinos and American Law: Landmark Supreme Court Cases by Carlos R. Soltero Publication Date: 2006
• The New Latino Studies Reader: A Twenty-First Century Perspective by Ramón A. Gutiérrez and Tomás Almaguer (eds.) Publication Date: 2016
• The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in Contemporary Politics, Law, and Social Movements by Suzanne Oboler, Deena J. Gonzáles (eds.) Publication Date: 2015

LatCrit: Other Materials

• Berkeley La Raza Law Journal
• Border Hispanisms (Book Series) University of Texas Press
• Chicano-Latino Law Review
• Harvard Latino Law Review
• La Alianza of Harvard Law School: Alumni/Student Newsletter
• Latinos in American Society and Culture (Book Series) University of California Press
• Latinos in the United States Series (Book Series) Michigan State University Press
• Latino Studies (Journal)
• Mexican American Experience (Book Series) University of Arizona Press
• Texas Hispanic Journal of Law and Policy
• University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

Asian critical theory as a legal academic discipline addresses the particular challenges related to discrimination against and marginalization of Asian Americans. 

According to Professor Robert S. Chang , who wrote the first article ever published in the Asian Law Journal (eventually renamed the Asian American Law Journal ), "Asian Americans suffer from discrimination, much of which is quantitatively and qualitatively different from that suffered by other disempowered groups." 

Accordingly, critical race theory, because it does not demonstrate "how different races matter differently," is not an altogether appropriate discipline to "address fully the needs of Asian Americans."  According to Professor Chang, while Asian Americans are often viewed in American society as "the model minority," the discrimination and violence they experience have created a unique narrative that deserves its own space and research discipline.

(Source: Robert S. Chang, Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space , 1 Asian L. J. 1 (1994).)

AsianCrit: HOLLIS Searches

• HOLLIS: "Asian Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Asian Americans -- Race Identity"
• HOLLIS: "Asian Pacific Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Chinese Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Chinese Exclusion Act"
• HOLLIS: "Filipino Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hmong Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Japanese Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Japanese Americans -- Evacuation and relocation, 1942-1945"
• HOLLIS: "Korean Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Model Minority" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "South Asian American" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Vietnamese Americans" AND "Law OR Legal"

AsianCrit: Selected Books

• Disoriented: Asian Americans, Law, and the Nation-State by Robert S. Chang Publication Date: 1999
• The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights: Liberal Protestant Activism, 1900-1950 by Sarah M. Griffith Publication Date: 2018
• The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism by Rosalind S. Chou and Joe R. Feagin Publication Date: 2015 (2nd ed.)
• The Subject(s) of Human Rights: Crises, Violations, and Asian/American Critique by Cathy J. Schlund-Vials et al. (eds.) Publication Date: 2020
• Two Faces of Exclusion: The Untold History of Anti-Asian Racism in the United States by Lon Kurashige Publication Date: 2016
• Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White by Frank Wu Publication Date: 2002

AsianCrit: Other Materials

• Asian American Experience (Book Series) University of Illinois Press
• Asian American History and Culture (Book Series) Temple University Press
• Asian American Law Journal
• Asian Americans and the Law (Book Series) Garland
• Asian Pacific American Law Journal
• Bibliography of Asian Studies (Journal/Database)
• Critical Asian Studies (Journal)
• Critical Perspectives on Asian Pacific Americans (Book Series) AltaMira Press
• Journal of Asian American Studies

Critical indigenous studies explores how indigenous people are situated within national power structures in a post-colonial context.  A related discipline, critical indigenous rights studies, has also emerged, which is primarily examines how rights and freedoms for indigenous people are impacted by larger questions related to autonomy and human dignity. 

Scholars in both of these fields critically question the framing and control of indigenous culture and heritage, and how these actions create a framework of social and legal hegemony that oppresses indigenous people and communities.

Critical Indigenous Studies: HOLLIS Searches

• HOLLIS: "Aboriginal" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "American Indians" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Colonialism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Colonial Narrative" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Imperialism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Indian Act"
• HOLLIS: "Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968"
• HOLLIS: "Indian Removal" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Indians of North America" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Indigeneity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Indigenous Peoples" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Inuit" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Nomads" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Postcolonialism"
• HOLLIS: "Self-Determination"
• HOLLIS: "Settler" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Trail of Tears"
• HOLLIS: "Tribal Governance"
• HOLLIS: "Tribe OR Tribal" AND "Sovereignty"

Critical Indigenous Studies: Selected Books

• Aboriginal Peoples and the Law: A Critical Introduction by Jim Reynolds Publication Date: 2018
• American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment by Jason Edward Black Publication Date: 2015
• Colonialism is Crime by Marianne O. Nielsen and Linda M. Robyn Publication Date: 2019
• Critical Indigenous Rights Studies by Giselle Corradi, Koen de Feyter, Ellen Desmet, and Katrijn Vanhees (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Critical Indigenous Studies: Engagements in First World Locations by Aileen Moreton-Robinson (Ed.) Publication Date: 2016
• Global Politics and its Violent Care for Indigeneity: Sequels to Colonialism by Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen Publication Date: 2018
• Indigeneity: Before and Beyond the Law by Kathleen Birrell Publication Date: 2016
• An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (ed.) Publication Date: 2014
• Indigenous Peoples as Subjects of International Law by Irene Watson (ed.) Publication Date: 2018
• Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity by Joanne Barker Publication Date: 2011
• Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed by Alexandra Harmon Publication Date: 2019
• Sovereign Acts: Contesting Colonialism Across Indigenous Nations and Latinx America by Frances Negrón-Muntaner (ed.) Publication Date: 2017
• The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Commentary by Jessie Hohmann, Marc Weller (eds.) Publication Date: 2018

Critical Indigenous Studies: Other Materials

• American Indian Law Review
• Annual Report of the Native American Rights Fund
• Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies (Book Series) University of Arizona Press
• Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society (Journal)
• Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity (Book Series) Yale University Press
• Indigenous Justice (Book Series) University of Arizona Press
• Indigenous Peoples and the Law (Book Series) Routledge
• International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies
• Publications of the National Congress of American Indians
• Tribal Law Journal

Professor Barbara J. Flagg , in the Washington University Journal of Law & Policy 2013 symposium issue, Whiteness: Some Critical Perspectives , summed up as follows why critical whiteness studies, as a scholarly discipline, are necessary:

"Whiteness is a social location of power, privilege, and prestige.  It is 'an invisible package of unearned assets.' As an epistemological stance, it is sometimes an exercise in denial.  Whiteness is an identity, a culture, and an often colonizing way of life that is largely invisible to Whites, though rarely to people of color.  Whiteness also carries the authority within the larger culture it dominates to set the terms on which every aspect of race is discussed and understood."

She goes on to call whiteness a "metaprivilege," which she defines as "the ability of Whiteness to define the conceptual terrain on which race is constructed, deployed, and interrogated."  In the United States in particular, she argues, "Whiteness is a largely transparent construction that constitutes the dominant site of power and privilege."

(Source: Barbara J. Flagg, Whiteness as Metaprivilege, 18 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol'y 1 (2005)).

Critical Whiteness Studies: HOLLIS Searches

• HOLLIS: "Aryan Brotherhood" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Ku Klux Klan" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Neo-Nazism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Feminism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Flight" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Hegemony" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Identity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Nationalism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White People" AND "Race Identity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Privilege" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "White Supremacy" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Whiteness" AND "Law OR Legal"

Critical Whiteness Studies: Selected Books

• The Construction of Whiteness: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Race Formation and the Meaning of White Identity by Stephen Middleton, David R. Roediger, and Donald M. Shaffer (eds.) Publication Date: 2016
• Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (eds.) Publication Date: 1997
• The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter Publication Date: 2010
• The Intersections of Whiteness by Evangelia Kindinger and Mark Schmitt (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Racism in the Neoliberal Era: A Meta History of Elite White Power by Randolph Hohle Publication Date: 2017
• White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race by Ian Haney Lopez Publication Date: 2006 (10th anniv. edition)
• White Self-Criticality Beyond Anti-Racism: How Does It Feel To Be a White Problem? by George Yancy (ed.) Publication Date: 2015

Martha Albertson Fineman , the founder of a scholarly project called Feminism and Legal Theory (FLT) in 1984, states that, "as a group, feminists are concerned with the implications of historic and contemporary exploitation of women within society."  To that end, two of their primary goals are "the empowerment of women and the transformation of institutions dominated by men." 

According to Professor Fineman, feminist legal theory consists of multiple ideological approaches.  Whereas some scholars believe that law should better reflect and accommodate differences between men and women, whether they are created by biology or society, other scholars focus more on the goal of greater "equality and gender neutrality" in the law.  

Feminist legal scholars are also interested in which Professor Fineman calls the "public/private divide in law." Specifically, "most are at least skeptical about privatization as a route of first resort for serious social policy issues," primarily because the concepts of public and private "interact as ideological channels for the allocation of societal resources, including the resources of power and authority." 

(Source: Martha Albertson Fineman, Feminist Legal Theory , 13 Am. U. J. Gender Soc. Pol'y & L. 13 (2005)).

Sex vs. Gender

The scholarly discourse on the concepts of "sex" and "gender" is very extensive, and a discussion of them that does justice to their complexity is well beyond the scope of this guide.  That said, it is generally understood that "sex" represents biological differences between men and women, whereas "gender" represents "the behavioral, cultural, psychological, and social characteristics associated with masculinity and femininity."

(Source: Definition of "Gender" in A Dictionary of Critical Theory, 2010.)

Historically, these two concepts have sometimes been referred to interchangeably. 

It is important to be mindful of sex and gender as biological and socio-cultural phenomena when engaging in critical feminist studies research.  Accordingly, researchers may want to consider the following reference works, which seek to define and clarify these concepts:

• Sex, Gender, and Civil Society (Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics)
• Sex, Gender, and Embodiment (Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology)
• Sex Versus Gender (Oxford Bibliographies: Sociology)

If you are doing research on critical gender studies, you may find relevant resources in several places in this guide in addition to this one, including under Queer Legal Theory and Intersectionality (both below). Because the literature on gender has evolved over the years, it can be challenging to decide under which heading certain resources should be located.

Feminist Legal Theory: HOLLIS Searches

• HOLLIS: "Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women"
• HOLLIS: "Feminism OR Feminist" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Feminist Jurisprudence"
• HOLLIS: "Gender Justice" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Girls" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Misogyny" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Mothers OR Daughters OR Wives" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Patriarchy" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Reproductive Justice" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Sex Discrimination"
• HOLLIS: "Sexism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Title IX" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Women" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Women's Rights"
• HOLLIS: "Womyn OR Womxn OR Wimmin" AND "Law OR Legal"

Feminist Legal Theory: Selected Books

• The Ashgate Research Companion to Feminist Legal Theory by Margaret Davies and Vanessa E. Munro (eds.) Publication Date: 2013
• At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory by Martha Albertson Fineman and Nancy Sweet Thomadsen (eds.) Publication Date: 1991
• The Classic Social Contractarians: Critical Perspectives from Contemporary Feminist Philosophy and Law by Janice Richardson Publication Date: 2009
• Constitutions and Gender by Helen Irving (ed.) Publication Date: 2017
• Feminism, Postfeminism, and Legal Theory: Beyond the Gendered Subject by Dorota Gozdecka and Anne Macduff (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Feminist and Queer Legal Theory: Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations by Martha Fineman et al. (eds.) Publication Date: 2009
• Feminist Legal Theory: A Primer by Nancy Levit Publication Date: 2016 (2nd ed.)
• Gender and the Law by Judith Bourne and Caroline Derry Publication Date: 2018
• Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field by Janet Halley, Prabha Kotiswaran, Rachel Rebouche, Hila Shamir (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Masculinities and the Law: A Multi-Dimensional Approach by Frank Rudy Cooper and Ann C. McGinley (eds.) Publication Date: 2012
• The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Women's Social Movement Activism Publication Date: 2017
• Postmodern Legal Feminism by Mary Joe Frug Publication Date: 1992
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg's Legacy of Dissent: Feminist Rhetoric and the Law by Katie L. Gibson Publication Date: 2018
• Women as Constitution-Makers: Case Studies from the New Democratic Era by Ruth Rubio-Marín, Helen Irving (eds.) Publication Date: 2019

Feminist Legal Theory: Other Materials

• American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law
• Cardozo Women's Law Journal
• Comparative Feminist Studies (Book Series) Palgrave Macmillan
• Decolonizing Feminisms (Book Series) University of Washington Press
• DePaul Journal of Women, Gender & the Law
• Feminist Constructions (Book Series) Rowman & Littlefield
• Feminist Criminology (Journal)
• Feminist Crosscurrents (Book Series) NYU Press
• Feminist Formations (Journal)
• Feminist Institutionalist Perspectives (Book Series) Rowman & Littlefield
• Feminist Judgments (Book Series) Cambridge University Press
• Feminist Legal Studies (Journal)
• Feminist Perspectives in Law (Book Series) Cavendish Publishing
• Gender and Well-Being (Book Series) Routledge
• Gender in Law, Culture, and Society (Book Series) Routledge
• The Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law
• Harvard Journal of Law and Gender
• New Feminist Perspectives (Book Series) Rowman & Littlefield
• Sex Roles (Journal)
• Studies in Feminist Philosophy (Book Series) Oxford University Press
• Texas Journal of Women, Gender, and the Law
• Women Law Professors: The First Century (1896-1996) (Journal Article) Catherine J. Lanctot's 2021 Villanova Law Review article chronicling the emergence of women law professors at American law schools during the 20th century.
• Yale Journal of Law and Feminism

The New Oxford Companion to Law defines the term "queer" as follows:

It is with this definition in mind that the sources below were compiled.

Queer Legal Theory: HOLLIS Searches

• HOLLIS: "Gay Liberation Movement" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Gay Rights" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Gender-Neutral" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Gender Fluid" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Gender Identity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Gender Non-Binary" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Genderqueer" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hegemonic Heteronormativity"
• HOLLIS: "Homophobia" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Homosexuality" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Intersex" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "LGBT*" AND "Law or Legal" Note: This search will return any materials that have an acronym of which "LGBT" are the first four letters.
• HOLLIS: "Queer Theory" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Sexual Orientation" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Transgender" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Transphobia" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Ze/Hir" AND "Law OR Legal"

Queer Legal Theory: Selected Books

• From the Closet to the Courtroom: Five LGBT Rights Lawsuits That Have Changed Our Nation by Carlos A. Ball Publication Date: 2010
• Gay Priori: A Queer Critical Legal Studies Approach to Law Reform by Libby Adler Publication Date: 2018
• Law and Sexuality: Critical Concepts in Law by Rosie Harding (ed.) Publication Date: 2016
• LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader by Marla Brettschneider, Susan Burgess, Christine Keating (eds.) Publication Date: 2017
• Nonbinary Gender Identities: History, Culture, Resources by Charlie McNabb Publication Date: 2017
• Out and About: The LGBT Experience in the Legal Profession by ABA Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Publication Date: 2015
• Queering International Law: Possibilities, Alliances, Complicities, Risks by Dianne Otto (ed.) Publication Date: 2018
• Sappho Goes to Law School: Fragments in Lesbian Legal Theory by Ruthann Robson Publication Date: 1998
• Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Discrimination by Holning Lau Publication Date: 2018
• Sexual Orientation, Gender Identities, and the Law: A Research Bibliography, 2006-2016 by Dana Neacs̜u (Editor in Chief) Publication Date: 2018

Queer Legal Theory: Other Materials

• International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies
• Journal of Gay and Lesbian Mental Health
• Journal of Gay and Lesbian Social Services
• Journal of Homosexuality
• Queer Action / Queer Ideas (Book Series) Beacon Press
• Queer Interventions (Book Series) Ashgate Publishers
• Queer Pasts (Research Collection)
• Queer Politics Queer Theories (Book Series) Temple University Press
• Research in Queer Studies (Book Series) Information Age Publishing

According to British critical disabilities scholar Dan Goodley, this discipline began by "establishing the factors that led to the structural, economic and cultural exclusion of people with sensory, physical, and cognitive impairments."

Its focus then gradually shifted to "developing nuanced theoretical responses to these factors." 

Goodley several other scholarly areas as having contributed its the emergence of critical disabilities studies. These include the following:

• Marxism , which enabled "a modernist response to the socio-economic exclusion of disabled people from everyday life"
• Sociology , which offered a new lens through which to explore disability as a social phenomenon
• Intersectionality , especially through "the merging of queer and disability studies" 

An important intersectionality-related result, according to Goodley, was the development of the concept of "crips," which is a way for disabled individual queers to self-identify that has emerged. 

(Source: Dan Goodley, Dis/Entangling Critical Disability Studies, Disabilty & Society, 28:5, 631-644, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.717884.)

Critical Disability Studies: HOLLIS Searches

Note: When relevant, a wildcard character is used so that a search with "disab*" includes disabled, disability, and disabilities.

• HOLLIS: "Ableis*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Accessibility" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Accommodat*" AND "Disab*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "AIDS" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Americans with Disabilities Act"
• HOLLIS: "Biopolitics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Cause Lawyering" AND "Disab*"
• HOLLIS: "Chronic Illness" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities" OR "CRPD"
• HOLLIS: "Disab*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Discrimination Against People With Disabilities"
• HOLLIS: "Invisible Disability" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Lawyers with Disabilities"
• HOLLIS: "Mental Health" AND "Disab*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Neurodivergen*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Patient" AND "Advocacy OR Rights" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Psychosocial Disabilities" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Rights of Persons with Disabilities"
• HOLLIS: "Right to Assistance" AND "Disab*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Self-Advocacy" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Social Medicine" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Sociology of Disability" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Universal Design" AND "Law OR Legal"

Critical Disability Studies: Selected Books

• Beginning with Disability: A Primer by Lennard J. Davis (ed.) Publication Date: 2018
• Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability by Aimi Hamraie Publication Date: 2017
• Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Publication Date: 2018
• Civil Disabilities: Citizenship, Membership, and Belonging by Nancy J. Hirschmann and Beth Linker (eds.) Publication Date: 2015
• Crip Times - Disability, Globalization, and Resistance by Robert Mcruer Publication Date: 2018
• The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation by Doris Zames Fleischer and Frieda Zames Publication Date: 2011
• Federal Disability Law in a Nutshell by Ruth Colker Publication Date: 2019 (6th ed.)
• The Long and Winding Road to Equality and Inclusion for Persons with Disabilities: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by Andrea Broderick Publication Date: 2015
• Punishing Disease: HIV and the Criminalization of Sickness by Trevor Hoppe Publication Date: 2018
• Social Injustice and Public Health by Barry S. Levy, Victor W. Sidel. Publication Date: 2019 (3rd ed.)

Critical Disability Studies: Other Materials

• Disability & Society (Journal)
• Disability, Culture, and Equity (Book Series) NY Teachers College Press.
• Disability History (Book Series) Manchester University Press
• Disability in the Modern World (Research Collection)
• Disability Studies Quarterly (Journal)
• Harvard Series on Health and Human Rights (Book Series) Harvard University Press
• Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders
• Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law
• Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies

Intersectionality in Critical Legal Studies

In scholarly literature, the term "intersectionality" is used in the analysis of issues related to identifying with more than one minority group.  This phrase was first coined by  Kimberle Williams Crenshaw , a law professor and HLS alumna, in a 1989 University of Chicago Legal Forum article,  Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrone, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Policies .

The suggested resources and HOLLIS searches listed below cover topics that may or do impact members of multiple demographic/identity groups that are analyzed in the critical legal studies literature.

For more information about intersectionality in general, the Oxford Research Encyclopedias online database includes several articles that discuss it, an excellent example of which is  Intersectional Stereotyping in Political Decision Making, by Erin C. Cassese .

Intersectionality: HOLLIS Searches

Note that certain language used in these searches may be considered to be particularly offensive, especially the use of the term "illegal aliens." 

In 2016, the Library of Congress announced its intention to  stop using this language  in the Library of Congress Subject Headings.  This decision was made in response to feedback from Melissa Padilla, a student at Dartmouth College who   noticed the phrase come up repeatedly in the library catalog  while researching a paper on immigration. 

The Republican-controlled Congress, however, included a provision in the 2017 appropriations bill that  prevented the Library of Congress from making this change .  Therefore, the subject term "illegal aliens" is still used in many library catalogs, although the Harvard Library's preferred subject term for this concept is "undocumented immigrants."  Since HOLLIS searches import records from other catalogs, links to both of those search options are included in the list below. 

• HOLLIS: "Access to Justice" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Allyship" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Antiracism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Assimilation" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Bail Reform"
• HOLLIS: "Biological Racism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Biometrics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Biracialism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Blackwoman OR Blackwomen" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Cause Lawyering"
• HOLLIS: "Civil Liberties"
• HOLLIS: "Collective Memory" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Colorism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Consciousness Raising" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Critical Criminology"
• HOLLIS: "Cultural Appropriation" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Cultural Racism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Cultural Sensitivity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Diaspora" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Discrimination in Housing"
• HOLLIS: "Equality Before the Law"
• HOLLIS: "Ethnology" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Eugenics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Eviction" AND "Discrimination" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Facial Recognition" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Fair Housing Act"
• HOLLIS: "False Consciousness" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Gentrification" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Group Identity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hate" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hegemony" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Identity" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Illegal Aliens" OR "Undocumented Immigrants" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Immigrant Families" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Inclusion*" AND "Law OR Legal" Note: This search will return results for "Inclusionary" as well.
• HOLLIS: "Intergenerational Justice"
• HOLLIS: "Interracial Marriage" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Intersectionality" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Jury Selection" AND "Bias OR Discrimination"
• HOLLIS: "Justice Gap"
• HOLLIS: "Legal Assistance to the Poor"
• HOLLIS: "Legal Pluralism"
• HOLLIS: "Legal Polycentricity"
• HOLLIS: "Low-Income Housing" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Marginali*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Meritocracy" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Microaggressions" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Minorit*" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Minorities" AND "Civil Rights"
• HOLLIS: "Miscegenation" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Multiculturalism -- Law and Legislation"
• HOLLIS: "One-Drop Rule" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Parable" AND "Race OR Racial OR Indigenous" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Peonage" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Pigmentocracy" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Positionality" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Predatory Lending" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Public Interest" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Race Awareness" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Race Relations" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Racially Mixed People" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Redlining" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Reparations for Historical Injustices"
• HOLLIS: "School-to-Prison Pipeline" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Social" AND "Change OR Integration OR Justice" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Stigma" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Tokenism" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Undocumented Immigrants" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Voter Suppression" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Vulnerable Populations" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Well-Being" AND "Law OR Legal"

Intersectionality: Selected Books

• Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State by Kumarini Silva Publication Date: 2016
• Confident Pluralism: Surviving and Thriving Through Deep Difference by John Inazu Publication Date: 2016
• Elements of a Critical Theory of Justice by Gustavo Pereira Publication Date: 2013
• Evaluation and Social Justice in Complex Sociopolitical Contexts by Barbara Rosenstein, Helena Desivilya Syna (eds.) Publication Date: 2015
• The Fight for Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences, and Future Implications of the 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act by Gregory D. Squires (ed.) Publication Date: 2018
• Forms of Pluralism and Democratic Constitutionalism by Andrew Arato, Jean L. Cohen, and Astrid von Busekist (eds.) Publication Date: 2018
• Gender, Sex, and Politics: In the Streets and Between the Sheets in the 21st Century by Shira Tarrant (ed.) Publication Date: 2016
• Gender Parity and Multicultural Feminism: Towards a New Synthesis by Ruth Rubio-Marín and Will Kymlicka (eds.) Publication Date: 2018
• Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, Decoloniality by Paola Bacchetta, Sunanina Maira, and Howard Winant (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Human Rights and Incarceration: Critical Explorations by Elizabeth Stanley Publication Date: 2018
• Inequality in the 21st Century: A Reader by David B. Grusky and Jasmine Hill (eds.) Publication Date: 2018
• Intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins Publication Date: 2016
• Intersectionality: An Intellectual History by Ange-Marie Hancock Publication Date: 2016
• Multiple Injustices: Indigenous Women, Law, and Political Struggle in Latin America by R. Aída Hernández Castillo Publication Date: 2016
• The Palgrave Handbook of Intersectionality in Public Policy by Olena Hankivsky and Julia S. Jordan-Zachery (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Politics of Scale: New Directions in Critical Heritage Studies by Tuuli Lahdesmaki, Suzie Thomas and Yujie Zhu (eds.) Publication Date: 2019
• Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror by Mary Bosworth and Jeanne Flavin (eds.) Publication Date: 2007
• Racial Ecologies by Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams (eds.) Publication Date: 2018
• Reasons of Identity: A Normative Guide to the Political and Legal Assessment of Identity Claims by Avigail Eisenberg Publication Date: 2009
• Research Handbook on Contemporary Intangible Cultural Heritage: Law and Heritage by Charlotte Waelde et al. (eds.) Publication Date: 2018
• The Routledge Companion to Intangible Cultural Heritage by Michelle L. Stefano & Peter Davis (eds.) Publication Date: 2017
• Vulnerability and Critical Theory by Estelle Ferrarese Publication Date: 2018
• Vulnerable Populations and Transformative Law Teaching: A Critical Reader by Society of American Law Teachers and Golden Gate University School of Law Publication Date: 2011
• When Love Leads to Justice: Love Across the Boundaries by David AJ Richards Publication Date: 2016
• Where Is Your Body?: And Other Essays on Race, Gender, and the Law by Mari J. Matsuda Publication Date: 1996
• Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis Publication Date: 1981

Intersectionality: Other Materials

• Class, Culture (Book Series) University of Michigan Press
• Communities (Periodical)
• Comparative Discrimination Law (Book Series) Brill
• Critical America (Book Series) NYU Press
• Critical Concepts in Law (Book Series) Routledge
• Critical Issues in Crime and Society (Book Series) Rutgers University Press
• Critical Multicultural Perspectives on Whiteness (Book Series) Peter Lang
• Critical Perspectives on Crime and Law (Book Series) Stanford University Press
• Cultural Diversity and Law (Book Series) Routledge
• Cultural Dynamics (Journal)
• Cultural Studies, Critical Methodologies (Journal)
• Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion: An International Journal
• Ethnic & Racial Studies (Journal)
• Ethnicity and Democratic Governance Series (Book Series) UBC Press
• Families, Law, and Society (Book Series) NYU Press
• Immigration & Society (Book Series) Polity Press
• Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
• The Journal of Poverty and Social Justice
• Juris Diversitas (Book Series) Routledge
• Landmark Law Cases & American Society (Book Series) University Press of Kansas
• Law and Inequality (Journal)
• Mother Jones (Periodical)
• New Critical Viewpoints on Society (Book Series) Paradigm Publishers
• Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series (Book Series) Palgrave
• Palgrave Studies in Race, Ethnicity, Indigeneity and Criminal Justice (Book Series) Palgrave
• Race and Culture in the American West (Book Series) University of Oklahoma Press
• Race and Social Problems (Journal)
• Race Relations Abstracts (Database)
• Routledge Research in Race and Identity (Book Series) Routledge
• Social Justice: A Journal of Crime, Conflict & World Order
• Social Justice Research (Journal)
• Social Policy and Society (Journal)
• Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (Journal)
• Studies in Critical Social Sciences (Book Series) Brill
• University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender, and Class
• Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice
• Wisconsin Multi-Cultural Law Journal

Critical discourse analysis, which is also called "critical linguistics," is an area of social science research that is concerned with the social use of language, or "sociolinguistics."  Specifically, it involves analysis of what is known in linguistics as "discourse," which represents the culturally-influenced use of language and non-verbal elements by people to communicate.

Critical discourse analysis can take place in many different contexts, including "intertextuality, interdiscursivity, social semiotics, and the social, political, and historical context of language in use[.]"  Approaches to critical discourse analysis may "criticize various forms of discursively constituted power abuse and hegemonic social structures that lead to injustice and social discrimination," and be "concerned with making transparent opaque, contradictory, power-related, manipulative relationships among language and society or social structures."

(Source: Martin Reisigl, Critical Discourse Analysis, in The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, 2013.)

Because the use of language is a significant element of the study and practice of law, critical legal studies researchers may want to also consider the critical discourse analysis literature.  Below are some HOLLIS library catalog searches that can be helpful in finding these materials in the Harvard Library collections.

• HOLLIS: "Anthropological Linguistics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Critical Discourse Analysis"
• HOLLIS: "Discourse" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Ethnolinguistics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hate Speech" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Hegemony" AND "Language OR Discourse" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Language" AND "Social Justice" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Language and Culture" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Language and Languages -- Political Aspects"
• HOLLIS: "Law -- Language" AND "Critical Studies"
• HOLLIS: "Legal Discourse"
• HOLLIS: "Linguistic Analysis" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Metalanguage" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Racist OR Sexist OR Ableist OR Discriminatory" AND "Language OR Discourse" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Semantics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Semiotics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Sociolinguistics" AND "Law OR Legal"
• HOLLIS: "Tone Policing" AND "Law OR Legal"

Critical legal history scholars explore the ways in which legal systems are functionalist , in that they provide functional responses to social needs.  Within the discipline, there are two broad schools of thought: (1) formalism , which focuses on the historical development of legal doctrine as a phenomenon separate from the meeting of social needs, and (2) realism , which explores how law is used to develop social and political policy, and in which law and society are bound.  These principles are illustrated in detail by the legal historian Robert W. Gordon in his article in the 1984 Stanford Law Review, Critical Legal Histories .

The resources listed below do not fall under a particular category of critical legal studies, but are more general in nature and may include some content that would be of interest to critical legal studies researchers.

Additionally, critical legal studies researchers might find the resources listed in the HLS Library's Law and Society research guide to be of interest.

• Al-Press Watch (Database) Coverage of alternative and independent presses.
• American Bar Association Diversity and Inclusion Center
• American Civil Liberties Union: Racial Justice
• Anguish and Action (Obama Foundation)
• Anti-Racist Resources Guide Harvard Law School Library's Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee
• Asian Americans in the Law Volume 5, Issue 1 of The Practice, journal of the HLS Center on the Legal Profession.
• Black America and COVID-19 Research guide from the Harvard Library
• Black Americans and the Law (Berkeley Law Library) Timeline-based overview of laws based in racial inequality.
• Black Lives Matter: Antiracism and Health Suggested Resources Written by Matthew Noe, Librarian at Countway Library, Harvard Medical School
• Black Lives Matter Resource Guide California State University San Marcos Library
• Black Perspectives: The Blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS)
• Boston College Journal of Law and Social Justice
• Center for Urban and Racial Equity
• Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice (Harvard Law School)
• Civil Rights and Social Justice (HeinOnline Research Library) Library of primary and secondary materials on U.S. civil rights law, including legislative histories, Supreme Court briefs, and documents from the Commission on Civil Rights.
• Conducting Research Through an Anti-Racism Lens (Library Research Guide) University of Minnesota library
• Confronting Anti-Black Racism (Harvard Library)
• Critical Criminlogy (Journal)
• Critical Sociology (Journal)
• Disrupting Whiteness in Libraries and Librarianship: A Reading List University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, Office of the Gender and Women's Studies Librarian
• Dissent (Journal)
• Diversity in the Legal Profession (University of Washington Law Library) Resources for law students and legal employers that are interested in fostering diversity.
• Ethnic newsWatch (Secondary Source Indexing Service) Search for materials in scholarly journals, dissertation and theses, newspapers, magazines, and more.
• Harvard Black Law Students Association (BLSA)
• Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession (CLP)
• Harvard Law School Project on Disability (HPOD)
• Harvard Law School Women's Law Association (WLA)
• Harvard Muslim Law Students Association
• Harvard Native American Law Students Association (NALSA)
• Harvard South Asian Law Students Association (SALSA)
• The HistoryMakers (Video Library) Subscription database available to Harvard affiliates. Features videos on African American organizations and associations, slavery, reconstruction, the labor movement, the civil rights movement and black authors.
• Immigration Law and Policy in the U.S. (HeinOnline Research Library) Includes primary and secondary materials related to US immigration law, including legislative histories, Supreme Court briefs, and BIA Precedent Decisions.
• Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: History, Culture, & Law (HeinOnline Research Library) Includes primary and secondary sources for laws related to indigenous people in the United States (also called Native Americans or American Indians).
• Juneteenth and the Emancipation Proclamation Reading list from Jstor with links to open-access sources
• The Justice Collaborative
• La Alianza at Harvard Law School
• Lambda Legal
• Law & Critique (Journal)
• Law & Ethics of Human Rights (Journal)
• Law, Meaning, and Violence (Book Series) University of Michigan Press
• Law360: Access to Justice (News and Current Events)
• Legal Services Corporation
• National Police Funding Database Maintained by the NAACP LDF, provides data about federal funding for local law enforcement agencies (the acceptance of which means that officers are bound by federal civil rights laws).
• Papers of Pauli Murray, 1827-1985 (Electronic Finding Aid) Pauli Murray's papers are held by the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library.
• Police Violence Research Guide University of Hawaii Law Library
• Prison Abolition Syllabus Includes critical, urgent, and informed writings on the history of prisons and prison rebellion, many of which are related to issues faced by people of color.
• ProQuest History Vault (Database) Several of the collections in this database address legal and civil rights struggles of marginalized groups in U.S. society.
• A Public Letter to the Associated Press: Listen to the Nation and Capitalize Black David Landham's excellent explanation of why "Black," when referring to Black people, should be capitalized.
• Race & the Foundations of American Law Course and Syllabus (Roger Williams University Law School) In 2021, RWU Law became one of just a handful of law schools nationwide to add a new required course on race and the law to its core legal curriculum.
• Race, Research, and Policy Portal (Harvard Kennedy School) Free online resource dedicated to summarizing and promoting research publications on diversity, racial equity and antiracist organizational change in private, public and non-profit firms and entities.
• Race, White Privilege, and Anti-Racism (Library Research Guide) University of Minnesota Library
• Racism in America: A Reader Free eBook published by the Harvard University Press; foreword by Professor Annette Gordon-Reed.
• Ratio Juris (Journal)
• Religion and the Law (HeinOnline Research Library) Library of primary and secondary sources exploring the intersection of law and religion, including religious freedom.
• Remote Resources for Anti-Racism (University of South Caroline School of Law)
• Resource Guide: Prisons, Policing, and Punishment Includes resources related to prison and police abolition, criminalizing blackness, gender justice, "crimmigration", LGBTQ criminalization, and more.
• Revisioning American History (Book Series) Beacon Press
• Seattle Journal for Social Justice
• Slavery in America and the World: History, Culture, and Law (HeinOnline Research Library) Library of primary and secondary materials related to slavery, including slavery statutes and judicial cases.
• Social Justice Guide (Howard Law School Library)
• Southern California Review of Law and Social Justice (Journal)
• Southern Poverty Law Center
• Talking About Race Portal (National Museum of African American History & Culture)
• Women and the Law (Peggy) (HeinOnline Research Library)

Additional Suggested Reading: An Antiracist Reading List by Ibram X. Kendi

On May 29, 2019, Professor Ibram X. Kendi of American University published An Antiracist Reading List in the New York Times. 

Links to the HOLLIS records for each of the titles in this list are provided below.

• Fatal Invention: How Scientists, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century , by Dorothy Roberts (2011)
• West Indian Immigrants: A Black Success Story? , by Suzanne Model (2008)
• The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America , by Khalil Gibran Muhammad (2010)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God , by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
• The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain , by Langston Hughes (1926)
• The Bluest Eye , by Toni Morrison (1970)
• The Blacker the Berry , by Wallace Thurman (1929)
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X , by Malcolm X and Alex Haley (1965)
• Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America's Heartland , by Jonathan M. Metzl (2019)
• Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America , by James Forman Jr. (2017)
• Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition , by Cecil J. Robinson (1983)
• Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America , by Peniel E. Joseph (2006)
• How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective , edited by Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor (2017)
• Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves , edited by Glory Edim (2018)
• Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More , by Janet Mock (2014)
• Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches , by Audre Lorde (1984)

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• Last Updated: Apr 12, 2024 4:50 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/law/critical-legal-studies

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Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking

(10 reviews)

Matthew Van Cleave, Lansing Community College

Copyright Year: 2016

Publisher: Matthew J. Van Cleave

Language: English

Formats Available

Conditions of use.

Learn more about reviews.

Reviewed by "yusef" Alexander Hayes, Professor, North Shore Community College on 6/9/21

Formal and informal reasoning, argument structure, and fallacies are covered comprehensively, meeting the author's goal of both depth and succinctness. read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

Formal and informal reasoning, argument structure, and fallacies are covered comprehensively, meeting the author's goal of both depth and succinctness.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The book is accurate.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

While many modern examples are used, and they are helpful, they are not necessarily needed. The usefulness of logical principles and skills have proved themselves, and this text presents them clearly with many examples.

Clarity rating: 5

It is obvious that the author cares about their subject, audience, and students. The text is comprehensible and interesting.

Consistency rating: 5

The format is easy to understand and is consistent in framing.

Modularity rating: 5

This text would be easy to adapt.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The organization is excellent, my one suggestion would be a concluding chapter.

Interface rating: 5

I accessed the PDF version and it would be easy to work with.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The writing is excellent.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

This is not an offensive text.

Reviewed by Susan Rottmann, Part-time Lecturer, University of Southern Maine on 3/2/21

I reviewed this book for a course titled "Creative and Critical Inquiry into Modern Life." It won't meet all my needs for that course, but I haven't yet found a book that would. I wanted to review this one because it states in the preface that it... read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 4 see less

I reviewed this book for a course titled "Creative and Critical Inquiry into Modern Life." It won't meet all my needs for that course, but I haven't yet found a book that would. I wanted to review this one because it states in the preface that it fits better for a general critical thinking course than for a true logic course. I'm not sure that I'd agree. I have been using Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking," and I think that book is a better introduction to critical thinking for non-philosophy majors. However, the latter is not open source so I will figure out how to get by without it in the future. Overall, the book seems comprehensive if the subject is logic. The index is on the short-side, but fine. However, one issue for me is that there are no page numbers on the table of contents, which is pretty annoying if you want to locate particular sections.

Content Accuracy rating: 4

I didn't find any errors. In general the book uses great examples. However, they are very much based in the American context, not for an international student audience. Some effort to broaden the chosen examples would make the book more widely applicable.

Relevance/Longevity rating: 4

I think the book will remain relevant because of the nature of the material that it addresses, however there will be a need to modify the examples in future editions and as the social and political context changes.

Clarity rating: 3

The text is lucid, but I think it would be difficult for introductory-level students who are not philosophy majors. For example, in Browne and Keeley's "Asking the Right Questions: A Guide to Critical Thinking," the sub-headings are very accessible, such as "Experts cannot rescue us, despite what they say" or "wishful thinking: perhaps the biggest single speed bump on the road to critical thinking." By contrast, Van Cleave's "Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking" has more subheadings like this: "Using your own paraphrases of premises and conclusions to reconstruct arguments in standard form" or "Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives." If students are prepared very well for the subject, it would work fine, but for students who are newly being introduced to critical thinking, it is rather technical.

It seems to be very consistent in terms of its terminology and framework.

Modularity rating: 4

The book is divided into 4 chapters, each having many sub-chapters. In that sense, it is readily divisible and modular. However, as noted above, there are no page numbers on the table of contents, which would make assigning certain parts rather frustrating. Also, I'm not sure why the book is only four chapter and has so many subheadings (for instance 17 in Chapter 2) and a length of 242 pages. Wouldn't it make more sense to break up the book into shorter chapters? I think this would make it easier to read and to assign in specific blocks to students.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 4

The organization of the book is fine overall, although I think adding page numbers to the table of contents and breaking it up into more separate chapters would help it to be more easily navigable.

Interface rating: 4

The book is very simply presented. In my opinion it is actually too simple. There are few boxes or diagrams that highlight and explain important points.

The text seems fine grammatically. I didn't notice any errors.

The book is written with an American audience in mind, but I did not notice culturally insensitive or offensive parts.

Overall, this book is not for my course, but I think it could work well in a philosophy course.

Reviewed by Daniel Lee, Assistant Professor of Economics and Leadership, Sweet Briar College on 11/11/19

This textbook is not particularly comprehensive (4 chapters long), but I view that as a benefit. In fact, I recommend it for use outside of traditional logic classes, but rather interdisciplinary classes that evaluate argument read more

Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less

This textbook is not particularly comprehensive (4 chapters long), but I view that as a benefit. In fact, I recommend it for use outside of traditional logic classes, but rather interdisciplinary classes that evaluate argument

To the best of my ability, I regard this content as accurate, error-free, and unbiased

The book is broadly relevant and up-to-date, with a few stray temporal references (sydney olympics, particular presidencies). I don't view these time-dated examples as problematic as the logical underpinnings are still there and easily assessed

Clarity rating: 4

My only pushback on clarity is I didn't find the distinction between argument and explanation particularly helpful/useful/easy to follow. However, this experience may have been unique to my class.

To the best of my ability, I regard this content as internally consistent

I found this text quite modular, and was easily able to integrate other texts into my lessons and disregard certain chapters or sub-sections

The book had a logical and consistent structure, but to the extent that there are only 4 chapters, there isn't much scope for alternative approaches here

No problems with the book's interface

The text is grammatically sound

Cultural Relevance rating: 4

Perhaps the text could have been more universal in its approach. While I didn't find the book insensitive per-se, logic can be tricky here because the point is to evaluate meaningful (non-trivial) arguments, but any argument with that sense of gravity can also be traumatic to students (abortion, death penalty, etc)

No additional comments

Reviewed by Lisa N. Thomas-Smith, Graduate Part-time Instructor, CU Boulder on 7/1/19

The text covers all the relevant technical aspects of introductory logic and critical thinking, and covers them well. A separate glossary would be quite helpful to students. However, the terms are clearly and thoroughly explained within the text,... read more

The text covers all the relevant technical aspects of introductory logic and critical thinking, and covers them well. A separate glossary would be quite helpful to students. However, the terms are clearly and thoroughly explained within the text, and the index is very thorough.

The content is excellent. The text is thorough and accurate with no errors that I could discern. The terminology and exercises cover the material nicely and without bias.

The text should easily stand the test of time. The exercises are excellent and would be very helpful for students to internalize correct critical thinking practices. Because of the logical arrangement of the text and the many sub-sections, additional material should be very easy to add.

The text is extremely clearly and simply written. I anticipate that a diligent student could learn all of the material in the text with little additional instruction. The examples are relevant and easy to follow.

The text did not confuse terms or use inconsistent terminology, which is very important in a logic text. The discipline often uses multiple terms for the same concept, but this text avoids that trap nicely.

The text is fairly easily divisible. Since there are only four chapters, those chapters include large blocks of information. However, the chapters themselves are very well delineated and could be easily broken up so that parts could be left out or covered in a different order from the text.

The flow of the text is excellent. All of the information is handled solidly in an order that allows the student to build on the information previously covered.

The PDF Table of Contents does not include links or page numbers which would be very helpful for navigation. Other than that, the text was very easy to navigate. All the images, charts, and graphs were very clear

I found no grammatical errors in the text.

Cultural Relevance rating: 3

The text including examples and exercises did not seem to be offensive or insensitive in any specific way. However, the examples included references to black and white people, but few others. Also, the text is very American specific with many examples from and for an American audience. More diversity, especially in the examples, would be appropriate and appreciated.

Reviewed by Leslie Aarons, Associate Professor of Philosophy, CUNY LaGuardia Community College on 5/16/19

This is an excellent introductory (first-year) Logic and Critical Thinking textbook. The book covers the important elementary information, clearly discussing such things as the purpose and basic structure of an argument; the difference between an... read more

This is an excellent introductory (first-year) Logic and Critical Thinking textbook. The book covers the important elementary information, clearly discussing such things as the purpose and basic structure of an argument; the difference between an argument and an explanation; validity; soundness; and the distinctions between an inductive and a deductive argument in accessible terms in the first chapter. It also does a good job introducing and discussing informal fallacies (Chapter 4). The incorporation of opportunities to evaluate real-world arguments is also very effective. Chapter 2 also covers a number of formal methods of evaluating arguments, such as Venn Diagrams and Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives, but to my mind, it is much more thorough in its treatment of Informal Logic and Critical Thinking skills, than it is of formal logic. I also appreciated that Van Cleave’s book includes exercises with answers and an index, but there is no glossary; which I personally do not find detracts from the book's comprehensiveness.

Overall, Van Cleave's book is error-free and unbiased. The language used is accessible and engaging. There were no glaring inaccuracies that I was able to detect.

Van Cleave's Textbook uses relevant, contemporary content that will stand the test of time, at least for the next few years. Although some examples use certain subjects like former President Obama, it does so in a useful manner that inspires the use of critical thinking skills. There are an abundance of examples that inspire students to look at issues from many different political viewpoints, challenging students to practice evaluating arguments, and identifying fallacies. Many of these exercises encourage students to critique issues, and recognize their own inherent reader-biases and challenge their own beliefs--hallmarks of critical thinking.

As mentioned previously, the author has an accessible style that makes the content relatively easy to read and engaging. He also does a suitable job explaining jargon/technical language that is introduced in the textbook.

Van Cleave uses terminology consistently and the chapters flow well. The textbook orients the reader by offering effective introductions to new material, step-by-step explanations of the material, as well as offering clear summaries of each lesson.

This textbook's modularity is really quite good. Its language and structure are not overly convoluted or too-lengthy, making it convenient for individual instructors to adapt the materials to suit their methodological preferences.

The topics in the textbook are presented in a logical and clear fashion. The structure of the chapters are such that it is not necessary to have to follow the chapters in their sequential order, and coverage of material can be adapted to individual instructor's preferences.

The textbook is free of any problematic interface issues. Topics, sections and specific content are accessible and easy to navigate. Overall it is user-friendly.

I did not find any significant grammatical issues with the textbook.

The textbook is not culturally insensitive, making use of a diversity of inclusive examples. Materials are especially effective for first-year critical thinking/logic students.

I intend to adopt Van Cleave's textbook for a Critical Thinking class I am teaching at the Community College level. I believe that it will help me facilitate student-learning, and will be a good resource to build additional classroom activities from the materials it provides.

Reviewed by Jennie Harrop, Chair, Department of Professional Studies, George Fox University on 3/27/18

While the book is admirably comprehensive, its extensive details within a few short chapters may feel overwhelming to students. The author tackles an impressive breadth of concepts in Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, which leads to 50-plus-page chapters... read more

While the book is admirably comprehensive, its extensive details within a few short chapters may feel overwhelming to students. The author tackles an impressive breadth of concepts in Chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, which leads to 50-plus-page chapters that are dense with statistical analyses and critical vocabulary. These topics are likely better broached in manageable snippets rather than hefty single chapters.

The ideas addressed in Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking are accurate but at times notably political. While politics are effectively used to exemplify key concepts, some students may be distracted by distinct political leanings.

The terms and definitions included are relevant, but the examples are specific to the current political, cultural, and social climates, which could make the materials seem dated in a few years without intentional and consistent updates.

While the reasoning is accurate, the author tends to complicate rather than simplify -- perhaps in an effort to cover a spectrum of related concepts. Beginning readers are likely to be overwhelmed and under-encouraged by his approach.

Consistency rating: 3

The four chapters are somewhat consistent in their play of definition, explanation, and example, but the structure of each chapter varies according to the concepts covered. In the third chapter, for example, key ideas are divided into sub-topics numbering from 3.1 to 3.10. In the fourth chapter, the sub-divisions are further divided into sub-sections numbered 4.1.1-4.1.5, 4.2.1-4.2.2, and 4.3.1 to 4.3.6. Readers who are working quickly to master new concepts may find themselves mired in similarly numbered subheadings, longing for a grounded concepts on which to hinge other key principles.

Modularity rating: 3

The book's four chapters make it mostly self-referential. The author would do well to beak this text down into additional subsections, easing readers' accessibility.

The content of the book flows logically and well, but the information needs to be better sub-divided within each larger chapter, easing the student experience.

The book's interface is effective, allowing readers to move from one section to the next with a single click. Additional sub-sections would ease this interplay even further.

Grammatical Errors rating: 4

Some minor errors throughout.

For the most part, the book is culturally neutral, avoiding direct cultural references in an effort to remain relevant.

Reviewed by Yoichi Ishida, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Ohio University on 2/1/18

This textbook covers enough topics for a first-year course on logic and critical thinking. Chapter 1 covers the basics as in any standard textbook in this area. Chapter 2 covers propositional logic and categorical logic. In propositional logic,... read more

This textbook covers enough topics for a first-year course on logic and critical thinking. Chapter 1 covers the basics as in any standard textbook in this area. Chapter 2 covers propositional logic and categorical logic. In propositional logic, this textbook does not cover suppositional arguments, such as conditional proof and reductio ad absurdum. But other standard argument forms are covered. Chapter 3 covers inductive logic, and here this textbook introduces probability and its relationship with cognitive biases, which are rarely discussed in other textbooks. Chapter 4 introduces common informal fallacies. The answers to all the exercises are given at the end. However, the last set of exercises is in Chapter 3, Section 5. There are no exercises in the rest of the chapter. Chapter 4 has no exercises either. There is index, but no glossary.

The textbook is accurate.

The content of this textbook will not become obsolete soon.

The textbook is written clearly.

The textbook is internally consistent.

The textbook is fairly modular. For example, Chapter 3, together with a few sections from Chapter 1, can be used as a short introduction to inductive logic.

The textbook is well-organized.

There are no interface issues.

I did not find any grammatical errors.

This textbook is relevant to a first semester logic or critical thinking course.

Reviewed by Payal Doctor, Associate Professro, LaGuardia Community College on 2/1/18

This text is a beginner textbook for arguments and propositional logic. It covers the basics of identifying arguments, building arguments, and using basic logic to construct propositions and arguments. It is quite comprehensive for a beginner... read more

This text is a beginner textbook for arguments and propositional logic. It covers the basics of identifying arguments, building arguments, and using basic logic to construct propositions and arguments. It is quite comprehensive for a beginner book, but seems to be a good text for a course that needs a foundation for arguments. There are exercises on creating truth tables and proofs, so it could work as a logic primer in short sessions or with the addition of other course content.

The books is accurate in the information it presents. It does not contain errors and is unbiased. It covers the essential vocabulary clearly and givens ample examples and exercises to ensure the student understands the concepts

The content of the book is up to date and can be easily updated. Some examples are very current for analyzing the argument structure in a speech, but for this sort of text understandable examples are important and the author uses good examples.

The book is clear and easy to read. In particular, this is a good text for community college students who often have difficulty with reading comprehension. The language is straightforward and concepts are well explained.

The book is consistent in terminology, formatting, and examples. It flows well from one topic to the next, but it is also possible to jump around the text without loosing the voice of the text.

The books is broken down into sub units that make it easy to assign short blocks of content at a time. Later in the text, it does refer to a few concepts that appear early in that text, but these are all basic concepts that must be used to create a clear and understandable text. No sections are too long and each section stays on topic and relates the topic to those that have come before when necessary.

The flow of the text is logical and clear. It begins with the basic building blocks of arguments, and practice identifying more and more complex arguments is offered. Each chapter builds up from the previous chapter in introducing propositional logic, truth tables, and logical arguments. A select number of fallacies are presented at the end of the text, but these are related to topics that were presented before, so it makes sense to have these last.

The text is free if interface issues. I used the PDF and it worked fine on various devices without loosing formatting.

1. The book contains no grammatical errors.

The text is culturally sensitive, but examples used are a bit odd and may be objectionable to some students. For instance, President Obama's speech on Syria is used to evaluate an extended argument. This is an excellent example and it is explained well, but some who disagree with Obama's policies may have trouble moving beyond their own politics. However, other examples look at issues from all political viewpoints and ask students to evaluate the argument, fallacy, etc. and work towards looking past their own beliefs. Overall this book does use a variety of examples that most students can understand and evaluate.

My favorite part of this book is that it seems to be written for community college students. My students have trouble understanding readings in the New York Times, so it is nice to see a logic and critical thinking text use real language that students can understand and follow without the constant need of a dictionary.

Reviewed by Rebecca Owen, Adjunct Professor, Writing, Chemeketa Community College on 6/20/17

This textbook is quite thorough--there are conversational explanations of argument structure and logic. I think students will be happy with the conversational style this author employs. Also, there are many examples and exercises using current... read more

This textbook is quite thorough--there are conversational explanations of argument structure and logic. I think students will be happy with the conversational style this author employs. Also, there are many examples and exercises using current events, funny scenarios, or other interesting ways to evaluate argument structure and validity. The third section, which deals with logical fallacies, is very clear and comprehensive. My only critique of the material included in the book is that the middle section may be a bit dense and math-oriented for learners who appreciate the more informal, informative style of the first and third section. Also, the book ends rather abruptly--it moves from a description of a logical fallacy to the answers for the exercises earlier in the text.

The content is very reader-friendly, and the author writes with authority and clarity throughout the text. There are a few surface-level typos (Starbuck's instead of Starbucks, etc.). None of these small errors detract from the quality of the content, though.

One thing I really liked about this text was the author's wide variety of examples. To demonstrate different facets of logic, he used examples from current media, movies, literature, and many other concepts that students would recognize from their daily lives. The exercises in this text also included these types of pop-culture references, and I think students will enjoy the familiarity--as well as being able to see the logical structures behind these types of references. I don't think the text will need to be updated to reflect new instances and occurrences; the author did a fine job at picking examples that are relatively timeless. As far as the subject matter itself, I don't think it will become obsolete any time soon.

The author writes in a very conversational, easy-to-read manner. The examples used are quite helpful. The third section on logical fallacies is quite easy to read, follow, and understand. A student in an argument writing class could benefit from this section of the book. The middle section is less clear, though. A student learning about the basics of logic might have a hard time digesting all of the information contained in chapter two. This material might be better in two separate chapters. I think the author loses the balance of a conversational, helpful tone and focuses too heavily on equations.

Consistency rating: 4

Terminology in this book is quite consistent--the key words are highlighted in bold. Chapters 1 and 3 follow a similar organizational pattern, but chapter 2 is where the material becomes more dense and equation-heavy. I also would have liked a closing passage--something to indicate to the reader that we've reached the end of the chapter as well as the book.

I liked the overall structure of this book. If I'm teaching an argumentative writing class, I could easily point the students to the chapters where they can identify and practice identifying fallacies, for instance. The opening chapter is clear in defining the necessary terms, and it gives the students an understanding of the toolbox available to them in assessing and evaluating arguments. Even though I found the middle section to be dense, smaller portions could be assigned.

The author does a fine job connecting each defined term to the next. He provides examples of how each defined term works in a sentence or in an argument, and then he provides practice activities for students to try. The answers for each question are listed in the final pages of the book. The middle section feels like the heaviest part of the whole book--it would take the longest time for a student to digest if assigned the whole chapter. Even though this middle section is a bit heavy, it does fit the overall structure and flow of the book. New material builds on previous chapters and sub-chapters. It ends abruptly--I didn't realize that it had ended, and all of a sudden I found myself in the answer section for those earlier exercises.

The simple layout is quite helpful! There is nothing distracting, image-wise, in this text. The table of contents is clearly arranged, and each topic is easy to find.

Tiny edits could be made (Starbuck's/Starbucks, for one). Otherwise, it is free of distracting grammatical errors.

This text is quite culturally relevant. For instance, there is one example that mentions the rumors of Barack Obama's birthplace as somewhere other than the United States. This example is used to explain how to analyze an argument for validity. The more "sensational" examples (like the Obama one above) are helpful in showing argument structure, and they can also help students see how rumors like this might gain traction--as well as help to show students how to debunk them with their newfound understanding of argument and logic.

The writing style is excellent for the subject matter, especially in the third section explaining logical fallacies. Thank you for the opportunity to read and review this text!

Reviewed by Laurel Panser, Instructor, Riverland Community College on 6/20/17

This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as... read more

This is a review of Introduction to Logic and Critical Thinking, an open source book version 1.4 by Matthew Van Cleave. The comparison book used was Patrick J. Hurley’s A Concise Introduction to Logic 12th Edition published by Cengage as well as the 13th edition with the same title. Lori Watson is the second author on the 13th edition.

Competing with Hurley is difficult with respect to comprehensiveness. For example, Van Cleave’s book is comprehensive to the extent that it probably covers at least two-thirds or more of what is dealt with in most introductory, one-semester logic courses. Van Cleave’s chapter 1 provides an overview of argumentation including discerning non-arguments from arguments, premises versus conclusions, deductive from inductive arguments, validity, soundness and more. Much of Van Cleave’s chapter 1 parallel’s Hurley’s chapter 1. Hurley’s chapter 3 regarding informal fallacies is comprehensive while Van Cleave’s chapter 4 on this topic is less extensive. Categorical propositions are a topic in Van Cleave’s chapter 2; Hurley’s chapters 4 and 5 provide more instruction on this, however. Propositional logic is another topic in Van Cleave’s chapter 2; Hurley’s chapters 6 and 7 provide more information on this, though. Van Cleave did discuss messy issues of language meaning briefly in his chapter 1; that is the topic of Hurley’s chapter 2.

Van Cleave’s book includes exercises with answers and an index. A glossary was not included.

Reviews of open source textbooks typically include criteria besides comprehensiveness. These include comments on accuracy of the information, whether the book will become obsolete soon, jargon-free clarity to the extent that is possible, organization, navigation ease, freedom from grammar errors and cultural relevance; Van Cleave’s book is fine in all of these areas. Further criteria for open source books includes modularity and consistency of terminology. Modularity is defined as including blocks of learning material that are easy to assign to students. Hurley’s book has a greater degree of modularity than Van Cleave’s textbook. The prose Van Cleave used is consistent.

Van Cleave’s book will not become obsolete soon.

Van Cleave’s book has accessible prose.

Van Cleave used terminology consistently.

Van Cleave’s book has a reasonable degree of modularity.

Van Cleave’s book is organized. The structure and flow of his book is fine.

Problems with navigation are not present.

Grammar problems were not present.

Van Cleave’s book is culturally relevant.

Van Cleave’s book is appropriate for some first semester logic courses.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Reconstructing and analyzing arguments

• 1.1 What is an argument?
• 1.2 Identifying arguments
• 1.3 Arguments vs. explanations
• 1.4 More complex argument structures
• 1.5 Using your own paraphrases of premises and conclusions to reconstruct arguments in standard form
• 1.6 Validity
• 1.7 Soundness
• 1.8 Deductive vs. inductive arguments
• 1.9 Arguments with missing premises
• 1.10 Assuring, guarding, and discounting
• 1.11 Evaluative language
• 1.12 Evaluating a real-life argument

Chapter 2: Formal methods of evaluating arguments

• 2.1 What is a formal method of evaluation and why do we need them?
• 2.2 Propositional logic and the four basic truth functional connectives
• 2.3 Negation and disjunction
• 2.4 Using parentheses to translate complex sentences
• 2.5 “Not both” and “neither nor”
• 2.6 The truth table test of validity
• 2.7 Conditionals
• 2.8 “Unless”
• 2.9 Material equivalence
• 2.10 Tautologies, contradictions, and contingent statements
• 2.11 Proofs and the 8 valid forms of inference
• 2.12 How to construct proofs
• 2.13 Short review of propositional logic
• 2.14 Categorical logic
• 2.15 The Venn test of validity for immediate categorical inferences
• 2.16 Universal statements and existential commitment
• 2.17 Venn validity for categorical syllogisms

Chapter 3: Evaluating inductive arguments and probabilistic and statistical fallacies

• 3.1 Inductive arguments and statistical generalizations
• 3.2 Inference to the best explanation and the seven explanatory virtues
• 3.3 Analogical arguments
• 3.4 Causal arguments
• 3.5 Probability
• 3.6 The conjunction fallacy
• 3.7 The base rate fallacy
• 3.8 The small numbers fallacy
• 3.9 Regression to the mean fallacy
• 3.10 Gambler's fallacy

Chapter 4: Informal fallacies

• 4.1 Formal vs. informal fallacies
• 4.1.1 Composition fallacy
• 4.1.2 Division fallacy
• 4.1.3 Begging the question fallacy
• 4.1.4 False dichotomy
• 4.1.5 Equivocation
• 4.2 Slippery slope fallacies
• 4.2.1 Conceptual slippery slope
• 4.2.2 Causal slippery slope
• 4.3 Fallacies of relevance
• 4.3.1 Ad hominem
• 4.3.2 Straw man
• 4.3.3 Tu quoque
• 4.3.4 Genetic
• 4.3.5 Appeal to consequences
• 4.3.6 Appeal to authority

Answers to exercises Glossary/Index

Ancillary Material

About the book.

This is an introductory textbook in logic and critical thinking. The goal of the textbook is to provide the reader with a set of tools and skills that will enable them to identify and evaluate arguments. The book is intended for an introductory course that covers both formal and informal logic. As such, it is not a formal logic textbook, but is closer to what one would find marketed as a “critical thinking textbook.”

About the Contributors

Matthew Van Cleave ,   PhD, Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, 2007.  VAP at Concordia College (Moorhead), 2008-2012.  Assistant Professor at Lansing Community College, 2012-2016. Professor at Lansing Community College, 2016-

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