Jill Breslau

When I mentioned the title of this article in an e-mail to another lawyer, she responded, “Hmmm. I missed that one in law school—and unwittingly took the practicum on ‘Just the Facts, Ma’am.”

Well, yes, me too.

The law is about Reason, not Emotion. If we had wanted to learn about emotion, we would have gone to graduate school to study psychology. Instead the goal was to learn to “think like a lawyer”. During my years in law school, I wondered if I had, and if I had learned it well enough. When I did well in law school, I felt as if I had joined a very elite club, and too bad for all the people out there who failed to understand that logic and reason were the right way to go about decision-making. I took great pleasure in the intellectual dance that is legal analysis. More recently, I could still relate to the judge who told me, with considerable satisfaction, that he thinks in outline form.