Grantee Research
The Role of Intuitive Reasoning in Lawyering and Legal Education
Document Type
Law Review Article
Publication Date
2025
Keywords
educational psychology and metacognition, teaching methods
Abstract
Intuition—a process of rapid cognition that offers foresight and helps with creative problem-solving—is a powerful tool that lawyers can use to inform strategic decisions, avoid ethical pitfalls, enhance communication, and increase career satisfaction. However, many law students come to law school after decades of being taught to trust only external sources—such as data, teachers, and other authority figures—and out of touch with their internal, intuitive resources.
Law schools exacerbate this disconnect by prioritizing grades, awards, rankings, prestigious jobs, and other external sources of satisfaction and meaning. Indeed, the study of law is primarily the study of external sources of guidance, such as rules and standards articulated by various bodies. Even the study of ethics in law school often focuses mainly on ethical rules, rather than students’ inner resources.
In contrast, “[t]he intuitive mode is characterized by engagement of the will, involvement of the senses, receptivity, a quest for understanding or meaning, and a facilitative tension between subjective certainty and objective uncertainty.” One important book on intuition posits that “every person has the ability to think intuitively and that intuition invariably yields truth.” Outside of legal education, educational theorists and scholars have proposed that intuition is a quality that can be nurtured and taught through various deliberate strategies, including intuitive arrangements of curriculum and instructional materials, acknowledging and discussing intuition in the classroom, and avoiding classroom dynamics that discourage students’ internal wisdom by, for example, conveying that there is only one right answer, known to the teacher and to be discovered by the student.
This article will explore the meaning and applicability of intuition in the context of effective, ethical lawyering and propose that law schools can—and should—teach students how to access their own internal guidance system. The article will propose concrete ideas for teaching and supporting intuition and internal focus in the law school classroom in an effort to help students become more ethical, more effective, and more satisfied lawyers.
