Abstract
Chaim Perelman believed that justice is a prime example of a “confused notion” which like other philosophical concepts, “cannot be reduced to clarity without being distorted,” and cannot be understood adequately from a perspective that is not rhetorical.1 This essay presents an argument for using the metaphor of small group decision making as a perspective for improving our understanding of the process by which courts do justice. Small group theory is essentially rhetorical, is consistent with argumentation analyses of appellate opinions, and extends Perelman’s ideas of the rational and the reasonable. The essay begins with a brief look at some approaches to legal research to set the stage for the thesis argument.
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Notes
Chaim Perelman, Justice, Law, and Argument (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980), p. vii.
Karl Llewellyn, The Bramble Bush (New York: Oceana Publications, 1951); The Common Law Tradition (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960).
Glendon Schubert, ed., Quantitative Analysis of Judicial Behavior (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1959); Judicial Decision-Making (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); The Judicial Mind (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965); Frontiers of Judicial Research (New York: John Wiley, 1969).
David Kairys, ed., The Politics of Law (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
See William L. Benoit, ‘An Empirical Investigation of Argumentative Strategies Employed in Supreme Court Opinions,’ in Dimensions of Argument, ed. George Ziegelmueller and Jack Rhodes (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1981), pp. 179–195; Nancy Dunbar and Martha Cooper, ‘A Situational Perspective for the Study of Legal Argument,’ in Dimensions, 213-241; and Stephen B. Jones, ‘Justification in Judicial Opinions: A Case Study’ Journal of the American Forensic-Association 12 (1976), 121-129.
Richard D. Rieke, ‘Argumentation in the Legal Process,’ in eds. J. Robert Cox and Charles Arthur Willard, Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), pp. 367–369.
Sarah E. Newell and Richard D. Rieke, ‘A Practical Approach to Legal Doctrine,’ Journal of the American Forensic Association XXII (1986), 212–222.
Martin P. Golding, Legal Reasoning (Chicago: American Bar Association, 1980).
Jovan_Brkic, Legal Reasoning (New York: Peter Lang, 1985).
E. E. Dais, ‘Legal Reasoning and Value Ambivalence,’ in ed. Hubert Hubien, Legal Reasoning (Bruxelles: Establissments Emile Bruylant, 1971), p. 22.
I. Jenkins, ‘The Framework of Legal Decision Making,’ in Hubien, Legal Reasoning, p. 293.
B. H. Levy, ‘On Justification of Judicial Decisions: Some American Contributions,’ in Hubien, Legal Reasoning, p. 310.
N. E. Simmonds, The Decline of Juridical Reason (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 116.
Simmonds, The Decline of Juridical Reason, p. 31.
L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law (Mineola, New York: The Foundation Press, Inc., 1978), p. iii.
L. Tribe, Constitutional Choices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 272.
Erich Jantsch, Design for Evolution (New York: George Braziller, 1975).
Jantsch, Design for Evolution, p. xvii.
Jantsch, Design for Evolution, p. 37.
Jantsch, Design for Evolution, p. 37.
Chaim Perelman, ‘The Rational and the Reasonable,’ in The New Rhetoric and the Humanities (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), p. 118.
Perelman, ‘The Rational and the Reasonable,’ p. 118.
Perelman, ‘The Rational and the Reasonable,’ p. 121.
Perelman, ‘The Rational and the Reasonable,’ p. 121.
Thomas M. Scheidel and Laura Crowell, ‘Idea Development in Small Discussion Groups,’ The Quarterly Journal of Speech 50 (1964), 140–145.
Scheidel and Crowell, ‘Idea Development in Small Discussion Groups,’ pp. 142–143.
Scheidel and Crowell, ‘Idea Development in Small Discussion Groups,’ p. 143.
For a discussion of the spiral process, see B. Aubrey Fisher, Small Group Decision Making (New York: McGraw-Hill Inc., 1980), p. 142.
Perelman, ‘The Rational and the Reasonable,’ p. 123.
Fisher, Small Group Decision Making, p. 143.
Justice Sandra Day O’Conner, Address given at the Annual University of Utah Law School Alumni Banquet, February 8, 1985, reprinted in Res Gestae 7, No. 2 (1985), p. 5.
Josina M. Makau, ‘The Supreme Court and Reasonableness,’ The Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984), 380.
Marshall Scott Poole, ‘Decision Development in Small Groups III: A Multiple Sequence Model of Group Decision Development,’ Communication Monographs 50 (1983), 321–341.
Poole, ‘Decision Development in Small Groups III,’ p. 330.
Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 Howard 393 (1856).
Loren Miller, The Petitioners (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1966), p. 63.
Miller, The Petitioners, p. 67.
Slaughter House Cases, 16 Wallace 36 (1873).
United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875).
United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1875).
United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883).
Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).
Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
See Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954); Richard D. Rieke, ‘Allies in the Field of Jurisprudence and Education,’ The Negro Educational Review 36 (January, 1985), pp. 13–21; J. Harvie Wilkinson III, From Brown to Bakke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Miller, The Petitioners, pp. 185-433.
University of California Regents v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978).
David S. Werling and Richard D. Rieke, ‘The Path of Legal Reasoning in Sex Discrimination Cases,’ in eds. J. Robert Cox, Malcolm O. Sillars, and Gregg B. Walker, Argument and Social Practice (Annandale, Virginia: Speech Communication Association, 1985), pp. 445–464. The author wishes to thank David Werling for significant assistance in developing the ideas for this essay.
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Rieke, R.D. (1986). The Evolution of Judicial Justification: Perelman’s Concept of the Rational and the Reasonable. In: Golden, J.L., Pilotta, J.J. (eds) Practical Reasoning in Human Affairs. Synthese Library, vol 183. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-4674-3_12
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