Logic Ab Initio: A Functional Approach to Improve Law Students' Critical Thinking Skills
22 Legal Writing 109 (2018)
44 Pages Posted: 24 May 2017 Last revised: 9 Oct 2018
Date Written: May 22, 2017
Abstract
Law professors are increasingly frustrated by students’ lack of critical-thinking skills. Students entering law school are, generally speaking, less academically prepared than previous cohorts due to educational, technological, and social trends that discourage the type of “deep thinking” necessary for law-school success. By introducing basic, “functional” logic training early on in law school and reinforcing logic principles throughout the curriculum, however, legal educators can not only improve the classroom learning dynamic, but actually help students strengthen the neurological circuitry responsible for critical thinking. Research on brain plasticity suggests that replacing students’ heuristic thinking habits with functional logic processes — and reinforcing them throughout the curriculum — actually builds and strengthens the brain’s neural connections related to reasoning and analysis. In other words, teaching logic could begin to remediate critical-thinking deficits.
This article bridges the body of scholarly works promoting the use of logic principles in law school classes and scholarship discussing the “crisis” in legal education caused by real or perceived deficits in students’ critical thinking skills. It examines some of the reasons for the trend away from “deep thinking,” explaining how that trend manifests itself in the law school classroom. And by describing law-school competencies enhanced by functional logic training, it demonstrates that the effects of that trend can be alleviated — at least in part — by integrating logic throughout the law-school curriculum.
Keywords: Law, Logic, Law and Logic, Law School, Legal Education, Critical Thinking
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