CLT SSLT Seminar with Kevin Toh on 6 May 2024

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) is pleased to have Professor Kevin Toh as our speaker for the Singapore Symposium for Legal Theory (SSLT) seminar held on 6 May 2024.

In his seminar, “Rules, Patterns and Prophecies”, Professor Toh discussed the conception of legal reasoning and whether judges more often than not, have underlying considerations that drive their decisions, using the rules that they employ as “window dressing. He discussed how these are the two typically recognised levels at which legal reasoning take place – the surface level of rules, and some underlying level of consideration. In this paper, he suggests a different and more vindicatory explanation of the reasoning judges employ, and the relation between the two levels of legal reasoning. Professor Toh also discussed theoretical components and the connectionist conception of cognition, and how these concepts may shed light on how legal reasoning is employed.