Instructional Explanations in a Legal Classroom: Are Students’ Argument Diagrams of Hypothetical Reasoning Diagnostic?

Much instruction in the first year of American legal education focuses on argumentation. Paradoxically, however, comparatively little of the instructional explanation in legal classrooms is about the process of argumentation. Instead, instructors teach law students the process of argumentation primarily by engaging them in argumentation about the issues, problems, and examples in the casebook. Instructors also use these arguments to teach law students lessons about the substantive rules of a legal area (e.g., contracts or torts) and about the applications, ambiguities, and limitations of those rules. In this sense, the instructor’s and students’ interactive argument dialogues are the instructional explanations of the argument process and an important component of the instructional explanations of the substantive law (Leinhardt, 2001, Handbook for research on teaching (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association).

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