Today we will begin our discussion of legal analysis.  We have all heard it time and time again:  the purpose of law school is to train you to “think law a lawyer.”  As the infamous Professor Kingsfield told his students in the 1973 film The Paper Chase, you come to law school “with a skull full a mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer.”  But what does that mean exactly?  Do lawyers really think different than other people?  What does it mean to “think like a lawyer”?  And, for that matter, what is legal reasoning?

The topic we are addressing today is inductive reasoning, another well-known type of reasoning often used in law school and in practice.  While you are more likely to see rule-based reasoning on law school exams (particularly during your first year), my guess is that you’ve talked about inductive reasoning in your legal writing course (even if your professor hasn’t referred to it as such).

It’s so difficult for me to believe that I started law school almost 25 years ago. There are a lot of things I don’t remember about 25 years ago, but what I do remember well are the many things I didn’t know when I entered law school.  Policy was one of those things.  None of my professors talked about policy directly, in the sense of explaining what they actually meant when they were talking about it.  Instead, policy was just something that came up every once in a while as students responded to questioning under the Socratic method.  Well, eventually I figured out that policy is the purpose or reason behind a rule.

If you’ve listened to the episodes on deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and policy-based reasoning, you know there is a lot of room for creativity in conducting legal analysis. This is one of the many reasons lawyering is challenging but also fun. Deciding which type of legal reasoning to use in a given case is driven by numerous considerations, such as careful reading, critical thinking, and professional judgment.