LAW 301—Legal Reasoning

In Kenneth Vandevelde?s words, lawyers read and analyze legal sources to find rules that ?identify the rights and duties that exist among particular individuals or entities under a given set of circumstances.? This course is an introduction to some methods and strategies of analysis and reasoning involved in this task. We will examine the principal sources of legal obligation ? enacted laws and judicial decisions ? and the techniques lawyers use to derive legal rules from these sources. In particular, we will look closely at the nature of legal rules and how statutory text, precedential authority, and considerations of policy figure in the process of translating legal texts into guidance about what the law permits or requires people to do.