Five Types of Legal Arguments

In this book Wilson Huhn shows why legal reasoning is so fascinating to study and so difficult to master. There are five types of legal arguments, and each type of argument can potentially give a different answer to the same legal question. Furthermore, each type of legal argument has characteristic strengths and weaknesses. Since each type of legal argument has a different structure and is based on different evidence of what the law is, each type of argument can be attacked in characteristic ways. With hundreds of examples from judicial opinions, Professor Huhn lays out all of the ways that legal arguments can be attacked, and explains how to compare one type of legal argument to another.

Wilson Huhn is a C. Blake McDowell, Jr., Professor of Law at the University of Akron School of Law.