Arthur Dyevre (KU Leuven Centre for Empirical Jurisprudence), Ahmad Shahvarough (KU Leuven), Pablo José Castillo Ortiz (University of Sheffield), Vera Hoorens, and Hannah Hirst (University of Sheffield) have posted Do Legal Traditions Shape Legal Reasoning? Evidence from Thinking Styles and Decision-Making Tasks on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
We compared the thinking styles of law students from the world’s major legal traditions: civil law, common law, and hybrid jurisdictions. Law students (N = 204) responded to two legal vignettes in which precedential cues and policy arguments were manipulated between-subjects. They also completed the Four-Component Thinking Style Questionnaire (4-CTSQ) and a Paragraph Completion Task (PCT) that measured integrative complexity. Legal tradition did not moderate the effects of precedential cues or policy arguments on the participants’ legal judgments of the cases in the vignettes, nor was it associated with differences in integrative complexity as measured through the PCT and through participants’ written opinions about the vignettes. However, the groups from the different legal traditions differed in their scores on the Close-Minded Thinking (CMT) subscale and the Preference for Effortful Thinking (PET) subscale of the 4-CTSQ. Participants from hybrid jurisdictions scored higher on CMT than participants from civil law and common law jurisdictions. Participants from both common law and hybrid jurisdictions scored higher on PET than participants from civil-law jurisdictions. Our results suggest a weak association at best between legal tradition and law students’ thinking styles, with no detectable influence on legal argumentation and decision-making.
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Lawrence Solum