One of my college textbooks in Logic described how a defense attorney got his client off by using an invalid argument. An invalid argument is a formal fallacy. I won’t go into the details of how this works or what makes an argument invalid, but the lawyer pulled a good one on the jury.
This has a term. It’s called sophistry, a deliberately invalid argument displaying ingenuity in reasoning in the hope of deceiving someone, and the jury fell for it.
It would be safe to say that the average person, a potential juror, is not a student of logic, so you can’t necessarily blame the jury.
While there are no formal “logic” courses in law school, Legal analysis is essentially an exercise in formal logic.
During Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, Alan Dershowitz used circular reasoning to argue that Trump’s conduct was not an impeachable offense. You’d think he’d come up with something crafty and ingenious so as to befuddle and confuse the jurors. The jurors, in this case, are U.S. Senators, many of whom are…wait for it…LAWYERS. After all, Dershowitz was a reputable Professor of Law at Harvard.
But first, circular reasoning is a logical fallacy in which the reasoner begins with what they are trying to end with. Other ways to express this are that there is no reason to accept the premises unless one already believes the conclusion, or that the premises provide no independent ground or evidence for the conclusion.
So did Mr. Dershowitz come up with something crafty and ingenious? You be the judge.
Here Dershowitz is talking about a quid pro quo, which literally means “this for that.”
Dershowitz said,
“The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful if the quo, in some way, were illegal.”
DUH!
This doesn’t even rise to the level of sophistry, nor is it clever and ingenious. It’s just plain stupid from a man who taught Law at Harvard.