Abstract: Exemplary reasoning plays a prominent role in both legal theory and legal practice. By ‘exemplary reasoning’, is understood to mean ‘reasoning by analogy’ or ‘reasoning by example’, but regardless of whether one uses ‘exemplary reasoning’ as logically equivalent to analogical reasoning or to refer to reasoning case-by-case. This form of reasoning is mostly viewed as involving reasoning with exemplary cases. There is, I would argue, another genre of exemplars that are highly relevant to law, namely, exemplary judges, that is to say, paradigmatically good judges. In this essay, my aim is to provide an account of what those exempla are and which roles they might play within a theory of legal reasoning. This analysis, I would argue, may also help us clarify the issue of how exemplary reasoning and analogical reasoning relate to each other.
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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