In an Exercise of Great Bravery, Foolhardiness, or Hubris, Stanford Law School Tries to Explain Thinking Like a Lawyer to the Other Grad Students

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Alene came back from helping son James settle into his freshman year at Stanford with a clipping from the Stanford Daily about a new course being offered by the law school to graduate students generally.

The course, entitled “Thinking Like a Lawyer,” consists of a sampling of twelve law profs, including Dean Larry Kramer (left),* Mark Kelman, Robert Weisberg, and Pamela Karlan.   Particularly in view of some reading and writing I’m doing now, I thought Larry Kramer’s quote was interesting:  “We think that our discipline has a sort of core. . . There’s a mix of core principles and a way of thinking about them.  If you understand that and you’re out in the world confronting what’s weird about the law, it’ll seem less weird.”

I’m in the midst of looking at analogical reasoning.  One of the most complete recent exposition of legal analogical reasoning was Cass Sunstein’s Harvard Law Review article.  But that kind of analogical reasoning (like Edward Levi’s canonical book) deals with propositional analogies, and expressly sets aside what I think is a deeper question about the role of pre-conceptual and non-proposition analogy and metaphor.  It’s hard not to come to the conclusion that the underlying thinking tools are pretty much the same across the board – deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical reasoning – but the categories by which we sort and filter the world’s complexity are in large part culturally derived. 

Well, more on this in future drafts of Aboutness, Thingness….

* Full disclosure:  The Stanford Law School dean’s office has an endowed commode, known as the Jeffrey M. Lipshaw Toilet, in honor of my contributions to the school over the years.  This honor in no way influenced my treatment of the subject matter of this post.