A Basis for Legal Reasoning : Logic on Appeal *

Logic has been central to legal education and thinking for many years. In the 1800s, when Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School, published the first modern casebook, the classical system "was premised on the view that law is a complete, formal, and conceptually ordered system that satisfies the legal norms of objectivity and consistency."2 The system was believed to be capable of "providing uniquely correct solutions or 'right answers' for every case brought for adjudication."3 It could "dictat[e] logically correct answers through the application of abstract principles derived from cases."4