Skills: Legal Argumentation

Full course description

The course is an introduction to legal argumentation. It provides students with the tools to identify, structure, and evaluate the plausibility of legal arguments. These tools are not connected to a specific legal tradition or branch of law; they are general tools that can be used in the assessment of any legal argument presented by anyone in any jurisdiction. The course also works as a natural precursor to Academic Writing (Law 2001): in Legal Argumentation students will learn how to evaluate and develop their own legal arguments; in Academic Writing students will learn how to organise their arguments in the shape of an academic essay.

There are two main parts to this course. The first, which takes place in period 4, focuses on argumentation in general. Here students will be introduced to basic concepts and techniques from argumentation theory. They will be taught the main components of an argument, learn how to identify and extract different kinds of arguments from a text, learn a technique known as ‘argument reconstruction’, and some basic tools to evaluate the plausibility of arguments in general. Despite its focus on general argumentation, students at this stage will already be practicing their skills on real legal arguments.

The second part of the course, which takes place in period 5, deals with some specific features of legal argumentation. Legal argumentation characteristically relies on terms such as “right”, “liberty”, “power”, and “immunity”. But these terms are often used loosely in legal discourse and as a result are the source of much confusion. The first couple of weeks of this part of the course will be devoted to the study of the “language of rights”, as it were. We will learn tools that will allow us to be more precise about the use of this language in legal argumentation. Next, we devote a module to the study of rule-based arguments and focus on the specific challenges that the analysis and presentation of rule-based legal arguments gives rise to. This will involve a brief discussion on some common misconceptions about the so-called ‘legal syllogism’. Following this, we will study situations when existing legal rules remain silent in a case. In such cases legal practitioners still – and typically do – present arguments for a given legal conclusion. The arguments often appeal to reasons, expert-opinion, legal principles, policy considerations, precedent, or make use of analogy. In the last few weeks of the course we will analyse some specific features of these arguments and learn how to reconstruct and evaluate their plausibility.

Assesment methods:

Students will be assessed in the following way:

• Period 4 (Week 7): Assignment consisting of the written analysis of arguments taken from actual legal decisions or academic legal papers. (30 points)
• Period 5 (Week 7): Assignment consisting of the written analysis of arguments taken from actual legal decisions or academic legal papers. (70 points)
• To pass the course students must obtain at least 55 points.