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Abstract:
Developments in cognitive science are transforming our understanding of the mind. Yet, surprisingly little of this new learning has penetrated discussions and analysis of law. This book is the first systematic attempt to assess cognitive science's implications for those who study, practice, or teach law. Today, legal studies focus on analytic skills and grand normative theories. But, to understand how real-world legal actors reason and decide, we need a different set of tools. How do lawyers and judges actually reason? What does it mean to decide according to precedent? How do rules work? In this post-realist/post-cls era, it may be a commonplace to see law as an imaginative product of all-too-human minds. But recent findings about categorization and reasoning reveal the remarkably orderly, yet creative, processes of human imagination. Cognitive science provides the tools to unpack these processes, making it possible to approach law in new, more cogent, more productive ways. The account of law that emerges from what we are learning about the human mind is profoundly different and substantially more complex than the one that animates either our everyday thinking about law or, even, our most sophisticated scholarly debates on the subject.