Journal Name: JOTWELL

Abstract:

The subject of legal reasoning has stimulated an enormously wide variety of books and essays, articles and comments, offering the reader systematic exposition, technical illumination, practical guidance and critical commentary. The reader is clearly unsatisfied. The production of material continues without any sense that the latest contribution is about to close the debate and complete our understanding. Maks Del Mar’s recent book is not likely to provide the last word on legal reasoning. It does provide a novel perspective on where the elusiveness of legal reasoning might lie. It seems that we cannot capture the subject because however learned we might become in the techniques of reasoning with the law that we have, there is always the problem that imaginary laws might be invoked to disturb the precedents and doctrines, the templates and patterns, into which we fit existing legal materials.

Additional Information: reviewing Maksymillian Del Mar, Artefacts of Legal Inquiry: The Value of Imagination in Adjudication