How different is different?

Abstract

Our instructional program, CATO, uses a model of case-based legal argument to teach law students basic skills of making arguments with cases. CATO represents abstract knowledge about the meaning of the similarities and differences between cases in a Factor Hierarchy, in which the ‘factors’ used to represent case facts are linked to higher level concerns and legal issues. The Factor Hierarchy enables CATO to identify issues in a problem and to organize multicase arguments by issues. The Factor Hierarchy also helps to assess and explain the importance of differences in terms of more abstract knowledge, yet in a manner sensitive to the context of the particular problem and case being compared and the argument for which the comparison is made.

We evaluated CATO in a controlled experiment, comparing 7.5 hours of CATO instruction to classroom instruction led by an experienced legal writing instructor. The results indicate that the CATO instruction led to significant improvement in students' basic argument skills, comparable to that achieved by the legal writing instructor. We also found that more is needed in order for CATO to prepare students for a more advanced and complex memo writing task.

We would like to thank Kevin Deasy of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law for graciously giving every possible cooperation to the evaluation study of the CATO program and Steffi Brüninghaus of the Graduate Program in Intelligent Systems for her very valuable contributions to the same experiment. The research described here has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, West Publishing Company, Digital Equipment Corporation, Tektronix, the National Center for Automated Information Research, and the University of Pittsburgh ECAC Advanced Instructional Technology Program. We gratefully acknowledge their contribution.