ABSTRACT
Theories about judicial and moral reasoning can be meaningfully assessed in terms of concepts of logic. Yet while these theories have been changing, the concepts in terms of which they have been discussed – deduction, induction, rationality – have also undergone great modifications. Legal theory surrendered uncritically to the prevailing notions of rationality. The judicial process was successively disguised in a variety of attires to secure the appearance of conformity with respectable forms of analytic and scientific reasoning. Despite authority to the contrary, reasoning with rules is not reducible to a species of inductive reasoning any more than it is reducible to a species of deductive reasoning. Since the late nineteenth century some legal philosophers have tried to demonstrate that legal reasoning is but a branch of that fashionable mode of reasoning: scientific reasoning. This attempt was prompted by influences similar to those that led to the induction theory of judicial reasoning.
