Legal Analysis and Communication

From pages 61-62:

PART III:
ANALYZING THE LAW

  Introduction  

    Legal analysis is at the heart of what it means to be a lawyer.  A lawyer must know what law applies to a client’s legal problem and what the law means.  In addition, a lawyer must be able to evaluate the client’s legal problem to determine if it is within the scope of the law factually.  This legal analysis precedes any type of legal work, whether it involves advising the client or persuading a court.

    Most first-year law students struggle with learning legal analysis before successfully mastering it.  The reasons for this are several.  First, legal analysis requires a deeper level of understanding of the material than a student can obtain from merely reading it.  This deeper level of understanding is achieved by doing, i.e., by applying the information read to perform a task.  Students whose prior educational experiences include limited experience in deep learning may find legal analysis to be more time-consuming and more challenging to master. 

    Second, legal analysis requires precise thinking.  Students need to extract more than a general understanding of the law from course materials, such as a judicial opinion or a statute.  Instead, students must determine precisely what the law means by evaluating it carefully and meticulously.  Students who are not detail-oriented or who are overly quick in their reading may find the more exacting requirements of legal analysis to be difficult.

    Third, legal analysis requires the ability to generalize and to draw reasonable inferences from legal materials.   Determining the policy behind a law or the motivation behind a judicial ruling may require thinking beyond the text of legal materials.  Students who have difficulty thinking beyond the text or determining what inferences might be reasonable to draw may find this aspect of legal analysis to be difficult.

    Fourth, legal analysis is cognitively sophisticated.  Not only does it require precision and attention to detail, but it requires creative thinking, inferences and generalities.  In addition, legal analysis makes intensive use of different forms of logic, such as deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, and reasoning by analogy.  Some students may have difficulty thinking flexibly, such as switching between narrow and broad thinking; or may have difficulty reasoning by analogy, such as determining the most pertinent points of comparison or articulating all of the logical steps.

    To make legal analysis easier to understand and master, this Part divides legal analysis into each of its logical steps, it provides you with various tools to help you understand and master each step, and it provides you with opportunities to apply those tools to evaluate your mastery.  Initially, you might make mistakes in mastering legal analysis.  That is typical, expected, and even perhaps desirable. 

    Making mistakes when learning legal analysis is typical because all law students make mistakes as they learn.  Making mistakes when learning legal analysis also is expected because legal analysis is complex.  Just as you would not expect someone to know how to fly a plane perfectly on the first attempt after reading the manual, you should not expect to perform legal analysis perfectly on the first try after reading material in this book. 

    Finally, making mistakes when learning legal analysis may even be desirable.  When you make a mistake, you have the opportunity to learn what you did wrong, correct it, and then try again with another example or problem.  Through this process, you will understand better what you must do, and you will improve your analytical skills dramatically.

    In the pages that follow, this Part will discuss the following steps of legal analysis:

Step 1 }   Determining What Law Applies
Step 2 }   Analyzing Enacted Law
Step 3 }   Analyzing Case Law
Step 4 }   Synthesizing the Law
Step 5 }   Applying the Law to Your Facts

To help you learn, each Step includes examples and opportunities to apply the information.