The Legal Mind: A New Introduction to Legal Epistemology

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Book Description

How does a person who practices law think? Do you need a lot of creativity to be a lawyer? Why is legal language so difficult to understand? Does legal intuition exist? The application of philosophical analysis on its own is no longer sufficient to provide answers to these questions. Our ideas about the capabilities of the human mind and the methods that can be used to solve problems have been fundamentally altered as a result of recent developments in the field of cognitive science. The workings of the legal mind are beginning to take on a new appearance as time goes on.

Bartosz Broek, the author of The Legal Mind: A New Introduction to Legal Epistemology (PDF), uses insights from the cognitive sciences and philosophical arguments to depict legal thinking as close cooperation between three cognitive mechanisms: language, imagination, and intuition. He also addresses the question of how to effectively use these three mental tools. This innovative and provocative approach offers a new perspective on legal thinking and raises important questions regarding the boundaries of legal interpretation and the role of rationality in the legal system.

Reviews

“Broek takes us on an enthralling journey into the nature of reasoning, using the courtroom and its legal framework as a particularly illuminating case study.”

The findings present a refreshingly novel angle on an age-old problem set.

The book is current, transparent, and illuminating, in addition to being astonishingly useful.

It is not only aimed at lawyers and logicians, but also at anyone who has ever been curious about how people figure things out.

Patricia Churchland of the University of California, San Diego

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“The Legal Mind” is a portrait of law and legal thinking that is historically informed, comprehensive, and original. It has a very straightforward and interesting writing style, has an international focus, and examines cases from a wide variety of countries and contexts. Additionally, it presents insights from the fields of philosophy, law, and cognitive science. In addition to this, it makes use of a wide variety of moral, legal, and philosophical theories in order to clarify legal reasoning and overcome misleading dichotomies, such as those between emotion and reason, analytical and imaginative thought, and top-down and bottom-up approaches to legal reasoning. This e-book is not only of great interest to readers in the legal field, but also in philosophy and other fields. Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the John A. O'Brien Chair in Philosophy Robert Audi

“The ebook titled ‘The Legal Mind' is a highly engaging, well-written, and one of a kind creative addition to the field of legal research. It offers a novel perspective on legal cognition, one that is founded on the combination of legal theory, cognitive science, and philosophical considerations. The contemporary theories of mind offer a vantage point from which to investigate how various human faculties (intuition, emotion, language, abstraction, insight, imagination, logic, and theorization) interact in the process of legal cognition. In this book, traditional methods of legal reasoning and interpretation are examined from both a historical and contemporary perspective, and then related to the method that is outlined in this book. It is highly recommended for legal theorists, practicing attorneys, and law students who are interested in broadening their understanding of what it means to know and apply the law. — Giovanni Sartor; University of Bologna

“The Legal Mind, Broek's e-book, comes highly recommended from me. It demonstrates how ideas from cognitive science can be utilized to solve challenges in the theory of legal decision-making and is a novel combination of contemporary cognitive science with classic legal theory. In this manner, it makes a contribution to the field of legal decision-making, which appeared to be dated but, as a result of the publication of an ebook such as this one, is receiving a revitalizing new impetus. At the same time, it makes a contribution to cognitive science by demonstrating how the findings of that burgeoning science can also be applied in a field that was, up until relatively recently, dominated by a rather abstract and theoretical discourse on theories of interpretation. In other words, it demonstrates how the insights from that blossoming science can be applied in a field that was previously The main added value of this volume is the fusion of legal theory and modern cognitive science; a value that is only increased by the analytical rigor of the analyses and the background support from conventional philosophy. — Professor Jaap Hage, Head of the Jurisprudence Department at Maastricht University

PLEASE TAKE NOTE That the only thing included in this transaction is the PDF version of the ebook “In the Legal Mind: A New Introduction to Legal Epistemology.” There are no access codes provided.