Buzz
Law professors and practicing attorneys in the U.S. often reference "thinking like a lawyer" in connection with the 1973 film "The Paper Chase." In the movie, Professor Kingsfield tells his first-year law students: "You come here with a skull full of mush, and you leave thinking like a lawyer." While law professors pride themselves on teaching students to think like lawyers, you don’t need to attend law school to sharpen your logic and critical thinking skills.
Steps
Identify the Issue
Approach a problem from every angle. To uncover all potential issues in a series of events, lawyers examine situations from multiple perspectives. Putting yourself in others' shoes allows you to understand different viewpoints.
- In U.S. law school exams, students learn to structure their answers using the acronym IRAC, which stands for Issue, Rule, Analysis, and Conclusion. Failing to identify all potential issues can derail an entire response.
- For example, imagine you’re walking down the street and see a ladder leaning against a building. A worker is standing on the top rung, stretching to the left to clean a window. No other workers are around, and the ladder’s feet are splayed onto the sidewalk where people are walking. Identifying the issue involves not only considering the perspectives of the worker and pedestrians but also the building owner, the worker’s employer, and even the city where the building is located.
Avoid emotional complications. There’s a reason people say you’re “blinded” by anger or any other emotion—emotions aren’t rooted in logic and can prevent you from seeing the critical facts needed to solve a problem.
- Accurately identifying the issue is crucial for determining relevant and necessary facts. Emotions and feelings can distract you with details that are minor or irrelevant to the outcome of the situation.
- Thinking like a lawyer requires setting aside personal biases or emotional reactions to focus on verifiable and provable facts. For example, in the U.S., suppose a criminal defendant is on trial for allegedly harassing a child. The police arrest the individual near a children’s playground and immediately question why he was there and his intentions toward the children playing. The man, distraught, admits to intending harm. While the details may be infuriating, the defense attorney will disregard emotional reactions and focus on the fact that the defendant wasn’t informed of his right to remain silent before questioning.
Argue both sides. Non-lawyers often view this ability as a sign of a lawyer’s lack of ethics, but it doesn’t mean lawyers don’t believe in anything. The ability to argue both sides of an issue demonstrates an understanding that every story has two sides, each with valid points.
- When learning to present opposing arguments, you’re also learning to listen to them. This builds resilience and allows you to approach more problems with a collaborative mindset.
Use Logic
Derive specific conclusions from general principles. Deductive reasoning is a cornerstone of legal thinking. In law, this type of logic is used when applying a legal rule to specific facts.
Construct a syllogism. A syllogism is a specific form of deductive reasoning often used in legal thinking, structured as follows: what is true for a general group is also true for a specific individual within that group.
- A syllogism consists of three parts: a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion linking the minor premise to the major premise.
- The major premise is typically broad and true in most circumstances. For example, you might say, “All dirty floors indicate carelessness.”
- The minor premise relates to a specific individual or event, such as, “This restaurant’s floor is dirty.”
- The conclusion connects the minor premise to the major premise. By establishing a universally applicable principle and verifying that the individual in question falls under that principle, you can conclude: “This restaurant’s floor indicates carelessness.”
Derive general principles from specific observations. Sometimes you lack a general principle, but you can observe several situations with similar facts. Inductive reasoning allows you to conclude that if an event occurs frequently enough, you can establish a general principle that the event will always occur.
- Inductive reasoning doesn’t guarantee the accuracy of your conclusions. However, the frequent occurrence of an event is often sufficient to form the basis of your principle.
- Suppose no one tells you the general principle: a dirty floor reflects some level of carelessness by store employees or the owner. However, you observe the following pattern: in several cases where customers slip and fall, judges rule that the store owner is negligent. Due to their carelessness, the owner must compensate the injured customer. Based on your understanding of these cases, you conclude: if a store’s floor is dirty, the owner has been careless.
- A few examples aren’t enough to create a reliable principle. A high proportion of independent cases within a group sharing the same characteristics makes your conclusion more accurate.
Compare similar situations using analogies. When lawyers argue a case by comparing it to a previous one, they are applying analogical reasoning.
- Lawyers aim to win cases by proving that the facts of the current case are particularly similar to those of a past case, so the new case should be decided similarly.
- Law professors teach students analogical reasoning by providing hypothetical fact patterns for analysis. Students read case details and apply the principles to different scenarios.
- Comparing and contrasting facts also helps you identify which facts are crucial to the case’s outcome and which are irrelevant or insignificant.
- For example, a girl in a red dress slips on a banana peel in a store and sues for injuries, winning because the judge rules the owner was negligent in not cleaning the floor. Thinking like a lawyer means identifying the key facts that led to the judge’s decision.
- In a neighboring town, a girl in a blue dress slips on a muffin wrapper in a café. If thinking like a lawyer, you’d conclude this case has a similar outcome. The girl’s location, dress color, and the object she slipped on are minor details. The important and similar facts are the injuries caused by the owner’s negligence in maintaining a clean floor.
Question Everything
Stop assuming. Like emotions, assumptions create blind spots in your thinking. Lawyers seek evidence for all factual claims and believe nothing is true unless proven.
Ask why. You may have encountered a child who asks “why?” to everything you say. While annoying, this is part of thinking like a lawyer.
- In the U.S., lawyers often refer to “policy” as the reason behind a law’s enactment. The policy of a law can be used to argue that new facts or circumstances should also fall under the law.
- For example, suppose in 1935, a city council passed a law banning vehicles in public parks, primarily for safety reasons after a child was hit by a car. In 2014, the council is asked whether the 1935 law bans remote-controlled drones. Are they vehicles? Does banning them advance the law’s policy? Why? If you’re asking these questions (and recognizing the arguments each side could make), you’re thinking like a lawyer.
- Thinking like a lawyer also means taking nothing for granted. Understanding why an event occurred or why a law was enacted allows you to apply that reasoning to other facts and draw logical conclusions.
Embrace ambiguity. Legal issues rarely fall into clear-cut categories. Life is too complex for legislators to account for every possibility when drafting laws.
- Ambiguity allows for flexible application, eliminating the need to rewrite laws every time a new situation arises. For example, the U.S. Constitution has been interpreted to address electronic surveillance, a technological advancement unimaginable to its drafters.
- A significant part of thinking like a lawyer is being comfortable with nuance and uncertainty. However, their existence doesn’t mean all distinctions are meaningless.
Warnings
- Thinking like a lawyer also requires judgment. A logically sound argument doesn’t necessarily mean it’s morally good. Judgment is needed to determine whether a line of reasoning or conclusion benefits someone or advances society, or if it’s destructive and harmful.
- Thinking like a lawyer is beneficial in many contexts. However, cold, rational critical thinking often isn’t suitable for resolving issues involving personal relationships or everyday social situations.
