It’s important to teach students legal reasoning skills. The law defines the borders of our rights, capabilities, and duties as citizens of a particular country and city. We cannot avoid the law in any way, no matter whether we are related to this industry or just common people who are obliged to follow it.

In early childhood, children are being taught what they are allowed to do and what not by their parents. This knowledge helps them develop self-awareness and norms of behaviours in society overall.

Basically, the education that students get from the school to the university graduation creates their personality and defines the future growth of their professional and personal development as well.

Students learn so many different subjects that are supposed to be fundamental for their future overall like math, foreign languages, history, science, chemistry, and others.

Preparing for the Future: Legal Reasoning in Everyday Life Decisions

Teaching law is not considered to be a necessary class. But it is capable of teaching students how the legislative system works, what local laws they need to follow how critical thinking actually is, and where it can be applied.

Talking about legal reasoning, well, this skill may come in handy in many situations in our lives, there is no necessity to work in a law firm and be related to the industry. This area helps to understand the direction of thoughts of judges, lawyers and everybody engaged in the law processes.

Legal reasoning can be applied in different areas to better understand other people or opponents and be able to logically explain their actions. Therefore, in this post. We would like to dedicate more attention to what legal reasoning is and why students are recommended to learn this area despite their specializations.

What is Legal Reasoning?

To begin with, we would like to say that legal reasoning is a scalable term that includes numerous elements and factors that have an impact on this process.

Legal reasoning is a specific way of thinking that common law specialists of different directions use to conduct deep research in all cases they receive, make the correct conclusion, and therefore the final decision in the case.

Legal reasoning is used to resolve different types of social conflicts that require independent investigation and solutions. The law creates these conflicts, while legal reasoning helps to resolve them. The process of foundation of legal reasoning as an official and obligatory process in the law investigation took much time.

Different specialists were using different approaches, theories, literature, and so on. Law workers require a common and precise definition of legal reasoning and its tools.

Teach Students Legal Reasoning

There are two basic approaches to legal reasoning—inductive and deductive methods. You must have heard about these investigating methods from modern movies about Sherlock Holmes. The selection of the approach depends on the case specifics and details the investigator is already aware of.

The main aim of legal reasoning is to find the right solutions to problems and make the right conclusion and eventually decision. Sometimes, someone’s life completely depends on this decision, so researchers need to be careful and very scrupulous.

So it is high time to provide you with definitions of what inductive and deductive methods mean and what their main difference is.

Inductive Method

This method works under the conditions and rules of induction. For example, when a lawyer is investigating a theft, he or she has very few details and proof. By starting research from one small case with a limited amount of information, they are going further step-by-step to research more information as well as more cases of the same crime.

It means the investigation starts from small to large. High-quality research on tiny things can lead lawyers to something really significant within a certain case.

The inductive method helps research build the chains of logic between information, people, and incidents to understand the causes of the actions, the relations, and results of these actions, and what conclusion they can provide. Overall, it helps to convert a small piece of useless information into valuable insights.

Deductive Method

The deductive method is something opposite to the inductive one. This way of thinking entails providing a conclusion and decision based on general information and knowledge about a certain case.

In this situation, the researcher has enough information, even too much related to the certain case—many actions, decisions, people, incidents, and so on. And the task of the investigator is to find the truth and make the right conclusion in this scope of information.

The deductive method includes analysis of this information and rational thinking. In general, all conclusions and decisions must be scientifically proven.

Why Should Students Learn about Legal Reasoning?

According to the opinion of many directors of law schools, students need to start learning legal reasoning from kindergarten. As we mentioned above, the skills of legal reasoning can be applied in different areas of the life of students—starting from relations with parents to future careers. Now we would like to list some benefits of learning this area by students overall:

Legal reasoning develops critical thinking – children and then students don’t know how to correctly perceive and behave themselves in different situations in their lives, legal reasoning is capable of teaching them to analyze each situation  and make the right conclusion (decision);

Legal reasoning helps the student to find comprise in many different cases and avoid conflict and arguments with their family, friends, teachers, bosses, and so on.

Beyond the Courtroom: Legal Skills in Various Professions

This way of thinking allows students to learn to look at things and situations from different sides, evaluate them 100% and make the right decision as a result.

Legal reasoning teaches that no matter how difficult the case is, there are always going to be numerous solutions and exits, you just need to do deep research to find them.

Legal reasoning teaches students to perceive different points of view and agree with them, even if they do not correspond to their understanding and thoughts.

Students will be capable of providing their rightness in different cases and conflicts based on the true facts after thinking and investigating.

Teach Students Legal Reasoning Conclusion

As we have figured out, there is no necessity to learn the law on a professional level to become proficient in legal reasoning. Based on our experience, we know numerous examples of where and how this way of thinking can be applied to your profit.

For example, you are a student, and you unfairly get the lowest mark in your class due to a personal dislike for the tutor’s side of you. When you tell this to the director, there is a huge probability that nobody will trust you due to your young age and little experience in tutoring.

Promoting Civic Engagement: The Role of Legal Reasoning in Democracy

Here comes legal reasoning. You need to spend some time collecting proof of your words and actions of the tutor to show the real facts to the director and stand for your opinion.

This is just a common situation due to the writing service RatedByStudents for most students where legal reasoning will come in handy. So if you don’t have the opportunity to learn legal reasoning at your educational establishment, then you surely can do it on your own by reading the literature and different practical cases.

We hope we convinced you to teach students legal reasoning.

Author’s Bio: Max Mitchell is the latest alumnus of our content marketing department.