How does a lawyer think? Do lawyers need a lot of imagination? Why is legal language so abstract? Does legal intuition exist? It is no longer possible to answer these questions by applying philosophical analysis alone. Recent advances in the cognitive sciences have reshaped our conceptions of the human mental faculties and the tools we use to solve problems. A new picture of the functioning of the legal mind is emerging.
In The Legal Mind: A New Introduction to Legal Epistemology (PDF), author Bartosz Brożek uses insight from the cognitive sciences and philosophical arguments to depict legal thinking as close cooperation between 3 cognitive mechanisms – imagination, intuition, and language – and addresses the question of how to efficiently use these three mental tools. This provocative and novel approach provides a fresh perspective on legal thinking and gives rise to important questions pertaining to the limits of legal interpretation and rationality in the law.
Reviews
“Brożek takes us on an absorbing journey into the nature of reasoning, using the courtroom and its legal framework as a particularly revealing case study. The results are a highly original perspective on an old set of problems. The ebook is fresh, clear,and insightful, as well as remarkably practical. It targets not just lawyers and logicians, but anyone who wonders how they figure things out.” — Patricia Churchland, University of California, San Diego
“The Legal Mind is a historically informed, comprehensive, and original portrait of law and legal thinking. Very clear and engaging in style, international in focus, and examining cases from many contexts and countries, it presents insights from philosophy, law, and cognitive science. It also engages many moral, legal, and philosophical theories to clarify legal reasoning and overcome misleading dichotomies – between emotion and reason, the analytic and the imaginative, and the top-down and bottom-up in legal thinking. This ebook holds great interest for readers not only in legal areas but also in philosophy or other fields.” — Robert Audi, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
“‘The Legal Mind’ ebook is a well-written, uniquely innovative, and highly engaging contribution to legal research. It provides afresh account of legal cognition, based on the integration of legal theory, cognitive science, and philosophy. Contemporary theories of mind provide a vantage point to examine how different human faculties (intuition, emotion, language, abstraction, insight, imagination, logic, theorization) interact in legal cognition. Past and present approaches to legal reasoning and interpretation are critically reassessed and linked to the new approach developed in the book. Strongly recommended for lawyers, legal theorists, and law students interested in expanding the awareness of what it means to know and apply the law.” — Giovanni Sartor, University of Bologna
“I highly recommend Brożek’s ebook The Legal Mind. It is a unique blend of modern cognitive science and traditional legal theory and shows how insights from cognitive science can be used to address issues in the theory of legal decision-making. In this way, it contributes to the field of legal decision-making, which seemed to be outworn but with an ebook like this receives a refreshing new impulse. At the same time, it contributes to cognitive science by showing how the insights from that blossoming science are also applicable in an area that was until recently dominated by a rather abstract and theoretical discourse on theories of interpretation. This fusion of legal theory and modern cognitive science is the main added value of this volume, a value which is only increased by the analytical rigor of the analyses and the background support from traditional philosophy.” — Jaap Hage, Chair for Jurisprudence, Maastricht University
NOTE: This sale only includes the ebook In The Legal Mind: A New Introduction to Legal Epistemology in PDF. No access codes included.
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.