ABSTRACT
Despite a wealth of commentary on legal reasoning, modem writers on the subject demonstrate a curious and regrettable disregard for the close connections between classical Greco-Roman theories of legal discourse and modem theories of legal reasoning and analysis. A few books on logic and legal reasoning, including Judge Ruggero Aldisert’s Logic fo r Lawyers and Steven Burton’s An Introduction to Law and Legal Reasoning are exceptions to this rule.1 Their books fall within the 2,500year-old tradition of rhetorical analysis and discourse created by Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. They, like countless rhetoricians, philosophers, linguists and lawyers before them, have attempted to build on that classical tradition.
