This presentation describes an empirical study that asks whether lawyers and judges use legal analogy on a day-to-day basis in a manner that reflects normative standards of reasonableness and rationality. From a theoretical perspective legal philosophers deny, transform, or mystify legal analogy, but lawyers and judges use it every day without comment. The question is important because we expect lawyers and judges use legal analogy thousands of times per day and law schools teach it as a basic skill. The argumentation schemes of informal logic supply a theoretical framework in the form of an argumentation scheme, but we do not know how the lawyers' and judges' practices correspond to the theory.

This presentation discusses the process of selecting a research question and developing some of the methods for data collection and coding.