Week 2 - Introduction to Legal Reasoning
Overview
The first unit of the course will focus on legal reasoning. As you learned in your persuasive writing courses, Aristotle proposed three strategies for persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos. Logos pertains to the logic of the argument. Ethos pertains to the credibility of the speaker. And pathos pertains to the emotional response of the audience. These three elements match the axes of the rhetorical triangle, with logos being tied to the argument itself, pathos to the audience, and ethos to the speaker or writer. See the diagram to the right.
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In legal writing, all three of these strategies apply--but perhaps most commonly people think of legal writing as being logical. So we will therefore start with logos. In this first unit, we will consider several concepts to describe legal reasoning:
The big assignment we are working toward is based on the Chris Connors scenario in Behrens on page 90.
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Reading
- Legal Reasoning Lecture 1 (click on this title)
- Legal Reasoning Lecture 2 (click on this title)
- Behrens, pp. 81-90 (I am attaching it here in case you haven't obtained your book yet)
- Behrens, pp. 59 - 68 (I am attaching it here in case you haven't obtained your book yet)
Activities
- Participate in a check-in Tuesday discussion in Bb.
- After reading Legal Reasoning Lecture 1 and pages 81-82 in Behrens, participate in discussion 2.1 in Blackboard. Complete by Thursday, January 31, 11:59 p.m.
- After reading Legal Reasoning Lecture 2 and pages 82-87 and 59-68 in Behrens, participate in discussion 2.2 in Blackboard. Complete by Sunday, February 3, 11:59 p.m.