1 Legal reasoning
The start of this course (Sections 1-6) introduces you to what happens when a legal dispute goes through the courts, considering how the courts take the facts relating to legal disputes, analyse them, assessing what is relevant or not, and then uses them to make legal decisions. It also considers what happens when decisions are made and the process through which judges record their decisions so that future courts can follow them, if it is appropriate to do so.
Watch the video below for an introduction to what you will learn about in the start of this course.
Download this video clip.Video player: Video 1
Transcript: Video 1
Welcome to this unit. I’m Paul Troop, a practising barrister and I’m the author.
In this unit we’re looking at the practical side of law. That’s the law that an individual would look at it if they wanted to know what their rights or their obligations were. It’s the law that a practising barrister or a solicitor would look at when they’re advising a client. And if a dispute came to court, it’s the law that a judge would rely upon when they’re deciding the case
Lawyers often describe this approach as ‘doctrinal’. Doctrine just means a set of rules or principles. So doctrinal law is all about what the rules are that people are supposed to follow, and how lawyers decide what they are. Sometimes doctrinal law is also called ‘black-letter’ law. This is because historically the two key sources of doctrinal law were statutes and common-law cases, both of which were printed in black letters in books.
This unit introduces problem questions. Problem questions are characteristic of legal study because they mimic this practical side. They give you a factual scenario to apply the law and answer the questions and from now on you’ll be seeing problem questions more and more often.
Answering a problem question requires you to apply the doctrinal or black-letter law to the problem to find an answer. This answer is generally what the legal rights or obligations are, or how a court would decide if the case came to court. This unit will show you how to answer problem questions using this approach.
Doctrinal law has been described as a neutral or objective approach to law, and some scholars have even described it as a science. But towards the end of the unit we’ll question how plausible that view really is.
Video 1
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