Developing Competence in Legal Reasoning: The Role of Knowledge Development and Ontological Change

Some domains in law – especially private law – are very hard to learn and to teach. Findings in expert-intermediate-novice studies suggest that the underlying reasons might be the required knowledge structure and its ontological qualities that are intricately linked to domain specific reasoning skills. This project, consisting of three experiments, seeks to answer the research questions: Which factors in the knowledge structure and in domain-general and domainspecific reasoning influence the difficulties students have with developing skill in private law, and What are the requirements for an educational approach that can help to overcome these difficulties?