ABSTRACT
By now it should be clear that legal reasoning is not a mechanical process, but rather one involving the exercise of judgment. The result that the lawyer reaches through the legal reasoning process can depend to a very great degree on the policies or values that the lawyer believes a court would prefer. The legal reasoning process thus deals with advocacy and prediction, not with fixed truth. The lawyer is engaged not in mechanically explicating what the law is, but rather in formulating a series of arguments about what the law ought to be as applied to a particular situation. In that process, political and moral values play as large a role as neutral logic or reason. Faced with the intrinsically political nature of law, lawyers adopt a variety of poses. Some believe that they have no obligation other than that imposed by the professional code of ethics and that they may use their skills for all who employ them.
