Teaching Creative Legal Reasoning with Examples from Supreme Court Oral Arguments

Transcripts of oral arguments before the US Supreme Court provide interesting examples of creative legal reasoning. They illustrate, often in dramatic fashion, a sophisticated process of concept formation and testing driven by skillful posing of hypothetical examples. From the viewpoint of legal education, however, taking advantage of this resource presents challenges. The underlying processes of hypothesis formation and testing is complex. It is not easy for beginning law students to understand the arguments or for even expert human tutors to provide feedback on students’ attempts at performing the process. We introduce a novel project with the dual aims of developing an intelligent tutoring environment for beginning law students to learn from these examples and an AI model of concept formation and testing for providing feedback. Our focus here is to provide an example of the phenomenon to be modeled, describe the model’s overall requirements, and relate it to creative legal reasoning.