Five Chess Positions to Learn Law and Legal Argumentation

Abstract

Law students should be able to fathom the application of legal rules to specific cases and develop a consistent argumentation to support this interpretation by using logic. Different skills and competencies are required for each of these processes. Therefore, effective learning of Law must complement the necessary knowledge of Positive Law with a set of teaching activities aimed at developing a well-structured legal discourse. Can chess be useful when deducing the general features of legal argumentation? Can we use certain positions or chess moves as a basis for the elaboration of didactic metaphors capable of creating dynamic learning environments? We shall present five chess positions in this paper, which we shall use as a teaching resource to extract ideas regarding how legal discourse is structured.