Postgraduate Course: Reasoning with Precedent (LAWS11334)
Course Outline
| School | School of Law |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines the practice of justifying legal claims and conclusions by reference to precedent. It combines case law analysis and jurisprudential discussion.
|
| Course description |
Students will a) discuss actual judicial opinions identifying how precedent is used in legal argument; and b) familiarise themselves and engage critically with the relevant jurisprudential literature on the subject.
This is an advanced course. It was not designed to be easy, but it was designed to be interesting, intellectually stimulating and fun, as befits a Masters course.
Topics to be covered include:
- Precedent as a source of law
- Precedents and arguments from authority
- Theoretical vs practical authority
- Binding authority vs persuasive authority
- The ratio decidendi of a case
- Deductive arguments in appeals to precedent
- Reasoning with precedent
- The structure of arguments by analogy in common law
- Inductive arguments in appeals to precendent
|
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
|
Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Further develop their ability to engage critically with legal precedent in the context of legal reasoning in general and juidical reasoning in particular
- Further develop their ability to articulate and assess sound precedent-based legal arguments; and
- Further develop an understanding of the moral and political dimensions of precendent based reasoning in law
|
Reading List
The following 2 papers will be discussed in the first seminar. Students are expected to have read them in advance of the first class meeting:
* F Schauer, 'Authority and Authorities' (2008) 94 Virginia Law Review 1931-61
* G Lamond, 'Persuasive Authority in the Law' (2010) 17 The Harvard Review of Philosophy 17-35
|
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The course will develop skills of analysis and the ability to read critically and closely, to evaluate, to debate, and to discuss relevant materials in a group, as well as an ability to write cogently in addressing such material
|
| Keywords | precedent,ratio decidendi,legal argumentation,legal rhetoric |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Luis Duarte D'Almeida
Tel: (0131 6)51 3781
Email: luis.duarte.almeida@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Lauren Ayre
Tel: (0131 6)50 2002
Email: Lauren.Ayre@ed.ac.uk |
|
|
University Homepage