Logic and the Law

Catalog description

The course is designed to develop reasoning skills that are useful for law school preparation, law school itself, and the legal profession. It will begin by introducing fundamental concepts in informal logic-included will be a review of validity and soundness and a variety of deductive forms. We will then discuss strategies for evidential reasoning and fundamental concepts in formal propositional and predicate logic. After establishing this background, we will apply it to the sorts of reasoning questions that appear on the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). At the end of the course, we will examine Supreme Court or other prominent legal cases and issues in the philosophy of law, analyzing the arguments involved using the skills that have been honed throughout the semester.