Yosemite B Hilton San Francisco and Towers Ballroom Level
Section on Law and Interpretation Gary Minda, Brooklyn Law School, Chair
How The Study Of the Mind Changes Our Understanding of Law and Life
Moderator:
Gary Minda, Brooklyn Law School
Speakers:
Peter Gabel, President and Professor, New College of California School of Law, San Francisco, California Mark L. Johnson, Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Lawrence M. Joseph, St. John's University Steven L. Winter, Brooklyn Law School
Developments in cognitive science are increasingly finding their way into legal theory. Professor Winter's forthcoming book, A Clearing in the Forest (University of Chicago Press 2001), is the first systematic attempt to assess cognitive science's implications for law and legal theory: How do lawyers and judges actually reason? What does it mean to decide according to precedent? How do rules work? 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. 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 developments in cognitive science suggest that human imagination operates in a relatively orderly and systematic fashion. If true, this insight would alter the contours of the traditional jurisprudential debates with respect to such issues as legal positivism and the (in) determinacy of legal rules. This year's Section meeting will feature critical discussions of this important new work and its implications for teaching, practicing, and writing about the law.