ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the 'thinking like a lawyer' strategy tends to inflate the importance of certainty, knowledge and an answer-driven worldview at the expense of understanding and managing the many unknowns of the law and legal practice. It presents the proposition that the strategy which begins a legal education needs to be expanded to include an appreciation and familiarity with uncertainty. The 'thinking like a lawyer' strategy is meant to equip law students and emerging lawyers with the resources necessary to make sense of the foreign and sometimes mystic language that cloaks the law. The strategy is successful when it operates to exclude and filter information in a particular kind of way. The Carnegie Report on US legal education observed, law schools do a very good job in teaching their students to master a high-order intellectual process which emphasizes the priority of analytic thinking, in which students learn to categorize and discuss persons and events in highly generalized terms.
