This is a book about thinking and reasoning. More particularly, it is about the thinking, reasoning, and argumentative methods of lawyers and judges, which may or may not be different from the thinking, reasoning, and argumentative methods of ordinary people. Whether lawyers think, reason, and argue differently from ordinary folk is a question and not an axiom, but it is nonetheless the case that certain techniques of reasoning are thought to be characteristic of legal decision-making. The focus of this book is on those techniques. Its aim is partly to make a serious academic contribution to thinking about various topics in legal reasoning, but mostly it is to introduce beginning and prospective law students to the nature of legal thinking. In the typical law school, especially in the United States, the faculty believes that it teaches legal thinking and reasoning by osmosis, or interstitially, in the process of providing instruction in substantive subjects such as torts, contracts, criminal law, property, civil procedure, and constitutional law. But less teaching of legal thinking and reasoning actually occurs than faculties typically believe, and even if it does take place, there may be a need to provide in one volume, abstracted from particular subjects, a description and analysis of much of what law students are supposed to glean from the typically indirect teaching of legal reasoning. Similarly, although most law teachers think that it is important that students know something about the major figures, themes, and examples in the canon of legal reasoning, much of this material also falls through the cracks in the modern law school, and again there appears good reason for presenting it in one place. This book seeks to address these needs, at the same time giving lawyers and legal scholars something to chew on—and disagree with—about most of the topics it takes on.