Clat 2020 Legal Reasoning

Clat 2020 Legal Reasoning

At one time law was considered to be a science; this belief was associated with the concept of “natural law.” And just as law was considered a science, legal reasoning was considered to be a species of deductive logic. However, it is now recognized that the purpose of legal reasoning is not to prove to others the truth of a statement of fact, but is rather to persuade others about how the law ought to be interpreted and applied. Although legal reasoning is logical in form, in substance it is evaluative.

Legal reasoning does not require specialized knowledge, such as: understanding the basic structure of a group of relationships; Recognizing logically equivalent statements; And the facts and rules given can or should be true.

There are two types of hard cases: cases where a rule of law is ambiguous, and cases where the validity of a rule is in question.

There are two types of hard cases:

(i) cases where a rule of law is ambiguous-Questions of ambiguity arise when the minor premise of a proposition of law is challenged.

(ii) cases where the validity of a rule is in question-questions of validity arise when the major premise of a proposition of law is challenged.

Hard cases are cases where two or more valid legal arguments lead to contradictory conclusions.