Demystifying Legal Reasoning

Demystifying Legal Reasoning defends the proposition that there are no special forms of reasoning peculiar to law. Legal decision makers engage in the same modes of reasoning that all actors use in deciding what to do: open-ended moral reasoning, empirical reasoning, and deduction from authoritative rules. This book addresses common law reasoning when prior judicial decisions determine the law, and interpretation of texts. In both areas, the popular view that legal decision makers practise special forms of reasoning is false.

Larry Alexander is a Warren Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law. He is the author of Is There a Right to Freedom of Expression? (Cambridge, 2005); (with Emily Sherwin) The Rules of Rules: Morality, Rules, and the Dilemmas of Law (2001); Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations (Cambridge, 1998); (with Paul Horton) Whom Does the Constitution Command? (1988); several anthologies; and more than 160 articles, book chapters, and review essays in jurisprudence, constitutional law, criminal law, and normative ethics. He has been a member of the faculty at the University of San Diego School of Law since 1970. He is coeditor of the journal Legal Theory (Cambridge), and he serves on the editorial boards of Ethics, Law and Philosophy, and Criminal Law and Philosophy. He is co-executive director of the Institute for Law and Philosophy at the University of San Diego, and he is past president of Amintaphil. Emily Sherwin is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. She specializes in jurisprudence, property, and remedies. She is the author (with Larry Alexander) of The Rule of Rules: Morality, Rules, and the Dilemmas of Law (2001) and has published numerous book chapters, articles, and reviews in her subjects of specialty. She was a member of the faculty at the University of Kentucky College of Law from 1985 to 1990 and the University of San Diego School of Law from 1990 to 2003, when she moved to Cornell University. She is a member of the advisory committee for the American Law Institute's Restatement (Third) of Restitution and Unjust Enrichment and a regular participant in roundtable conferences of the University of San Diego's Institute for Law and Philosophy.