ABSTRACT
Legal reasoning is, broadly speaking, practical reasoning. Practical reasoning moves from reasons for action to choices guided by those reasons. A natural law theory is nothing other than a theory of good reasons for choice. The law seeks to provide sources of reasoning—statutes and statute-based rules, common law rules, and customs—capable of ranking alternative resolutions as or wrong, and thus better and worse. Lawyers' tools of trade—their ability to find and use the authoritative sources—are means in the service of a purpose sufficiently definite to constitute a technique, a mode of technical reasoning. Legal reasoning, indeed, is technical reasoning, at least in large part—not moral reasoning. Like all technical reasoning, it is concerned to achieve a particular purpose, a definite state of affairs which can be achieved by efficient disposition of means to end.
