3.2.3 THEABSTRACTIONLADDER

Many legal writers use a theoretical device called the abstraction ladder to help them identify relevant categories. The abstraction ladder is based on the concept that everything in the world can be thought of at various levels of abstraction or concreteness.

First, let’s define our terms. The word abstract has several meanings and is sometimes hard for people to understand. It is used earlier in this chapter to talk about a written summary of the information in the record or joint appendix. The meaning of abstract in the abstraction ladder has perhaps a more familiar definition. In this sense, art is abstract if two people could see different things in the same painting. A word is abstract if people could perceive two (or more) different meanings from the same word.

For example, if someone asked you what you did last night with your roommate, you might say, somewhat abstractly, “we went out.” Different people might conjure up different mental images of where you went or what you did from your rather abstract reply. You might be a little less abstract and say, “we went to a movie.” Even with this description, some people might picture you at a megaplex in the suburbs, watching the latest Marvel comics hit, while others would picture you at an art house downtown, taking in a documentary. You could be a little more concrete and say, “We went to the Lennox.” Or you might say, “We saw RBG at the 7:30 show at the Lennox. It was jammed.” With this answer, you give your listener a very concrete image of what you did last night. Thus, the words you use to describe something can be placed on a ladder between the extremes of “most abstract” and “most concrete.” You might think of the ladder growing wider as it grows taller; the more abstract something is, the more other items share the same rung.

Moving in the other direction, from most concrete to most abstract, you can think of a cow by thinking of Bossy, a particular cow. Or you can be a little more abstract and think of a Holstein. Or you can be a little more abstract and just think of cows in general. Or you could move up the abstraction ladder — or several abstraction ladders — and think of farm animals, or mammals, or farm property, or assets, or wealth. At the top of this (and every) abstraction ladder, you can think of a cow as a “thing.”¹⁰

This concept is important to legal analysis because abstract reasoning helps lawyers to identify analogous authorities. Once you recognize that facts and issues can be put into broader, more abstract categories, you may be better able to see legal similarities between your client’s case and relevant authorities. Very frequently, the tension in a legal argument is about whether a rule applies to a broad category that includes a certain person, thing, or event, or whether the rule applies to a narrower group that excludes a certain person, thing, or event. You can use the abstraction ladder to identify both legal and factual categories that may be significant to your argument.