Over the weekend, I began reading H. Patrick Glenn's excellent book Legal Traditions of the World, which is extremely well written and informative. In the chapter on the civil law tradition, I found this tidbit about legal method:
Aristotle said that what you really can’t do, what nobody will let you get away with in argument, is affirming at the same time two things which contradict themselves. Put the other way, between two contradictory things, there is no middle (it’s excluded). You heard this as a child -- you can’t have your cake and eat it too. And everybody now knows this. There is no middle ground between contradictory things…. So once you know that two things are contradictory, once they have been defined and boundaried so that you know they are contradictory, that’s it. You have irreconcilable difference, or separation, or possibly incommensurability, or quite possibly conflict…. But what you now have is precision, since you have a notion of consistency, and consistency is what allows you to build, as opposed to simply wandering around amongst the differences.
As regular readers of this blog may remember, I posted some thoughts about legal method back in February and focused on analogical reasoning. The principle of consistency is an implicit requirement of analogical reasoning. Lawyers spend a great deal of time and energy probing facts and doctrine to discover consistencies and inconsistencies.
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