Comparative Legal Reasoning
This seminar will examine differences in the method and style of legal reasoning between continental legal systems and common-law legal systems, with particular emphasis on judicial decisions in human rights litigation. We will start by trying to establish what, in each of those systems, would be considered the ideal form of legal argumentation; that is the type of reasoning that would be addressed to what Chaim Perelman, and Jurgen Habermas following Perelman, called a "universal audience." We shall also explore the question of how each of these types of legal systems copes with the tensions between the utopian desire for broad general principles of law and the pragmatic recognition that the law deals with concrete situations that require a more particular and narrowly focused doctrinal base. Throughout the seminar we shall be exploring how the structure and forms of legal and moral reasoning that is accepted as appropriate by particular society are influenced by the underlying value structure of that society and in turn actually influence and shape the value structure of that society.
Please note that course organization and content may vary substantially from semester to semester and descriptions are not necessarily professor specific. Please contact the instructor directly if you have particular course-related questions.