Vico, Llewellyn and the Task of Legal Education

Abstract:     
Legal education fails students by not appreciating the rhetorical basis of legal reasoning and argumentation. I draw from Vico's "On the Study Methods of Our Time" and Llewellyn's legal realism; both argued that law and legal reasoning are exemplary sites of rhetoric. I suggest that contemporary cognitive studies of the metaphorical structure of human understanding and the initiatives of the "new legal realism" carry forward the insights of Vico and Llewellyn. This re-orientation corrects the shallow and instrumentalist outlook of most lawyers.

Keywords: Giambattista Vico, Karl Llewellyn, Legal Education, Rhetoric, Carnegie Report, Metaphor, Legal Reasoning, Argumentation, Mark Johnson, The New Legal Realism

Working Paper Series