Thinking Like a Lawyer; Thinking Like a Chess Player

A lawyer's approach to studying the Common Law of Chess

The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you, unlike any schooling you’ve been through before. We use the Socratic method here. I call on you, ask you a question, and you answer it. Why don’t I just give you a lecture? Because through my questions you learn to teach yourselves. Through this method of questioning, answering, questioning, answering, we seek to develop in you the ability to analyze that vast complex of facts that constitute the relationships of members within a given society. . . . You teach yourselves the law, but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.

-John Houseman as Prof. Charles W. Kingsfield, Jr., in The Paper Chase (20th Century Fox 1973)

I have a skull full of mush. For chess, at least. Law is a different story. I did well in law school and now, with the benefit of nearly 20 years of practice, I can comfortably say that I know how to think like a lawyer.

But chess? Yikes.

I picked up the game in my late 30s and, nearly eight years later, I’m still a patzer. Although some of that is the inevitable handicap that starting late poses for mastering skills like calculation and visualization, a much larger part is that I struggle to think like a chess player. A master looks at a position and can instantly extract its essence and the plans for both sides. I look at a position and see a bunch of wood.

How frustrating it is to be accomplished in a difficult professional field like law and yet find this game so impenetrable!

Which got me thinking. I knew what it took to master thinking like a lawyer. Could I apply some of those lessons to learning to think like a chess player?

The Common Law of Chess

After all, chess and law aren’t so different. Chess, too, is governed by laws, and I don’t mean just the official rules. The rules—what might be called the Statutory Law of Chess—are a part of the Law of Chess, but they are just a tiny fraction of whole.

The vast bulk of the Law of Chess is not found in the written rules of the game. Rather, it consists of the principles that decide individual games played under those rules. This is what might be called the Common Law of Chess.

Like the Common Law in the Anglo-American legal tradition, the Common Law of Chess was not handed down by a legislative body like Parliament or FIDE. It was discovered gradually, over the course of countless millions of over-the-board disputes. And these disputes have much the character of a legal argument, with every move constituting a claim of entitlement to some portion of the board, or the opponent’s material, or the ultimate prize of checkmate. Chess scholars have studied the most successful of these arguments and extracted principles that govern the outcome of games.

Some of these principles—especially in the endgame—are no less binding than the written rules. The rules of chess, for example, make no mention of the principle of opposition, but even Magnus Carlsen can’t force a draw against a player who holds the opposition in a winning King and Pawn endgame.

Unfortunately, most of the law of chess cannot be applied so mechanically. Before one reaches the legal clarity of the endgame, one must first pass through the middlegame. And this is where the law gets messy. There are fewer ironclad rules and more general principles.

Many of those principles are handed down like legal maxims: Rooks belong on open files; a pawn is worth three tempi; never play f6. But as the famous jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., observed, “General principles do not decide concrete cases.” The player who simply memorizes the principles and mindlessly deploys them over the board will place rooks on open files that cannot be usefully exploited, hunt pawns worth not even a single tempo, and lose to back-rank mate when only f6 might have prevented it.

Thinking like a chess player—no less than thinking like a lawyer—isn’t about memorizing rules, it’s about developing judgment. It’s about knowing the limits of general principles and when they must be discarded, often in favor of some other principle that better suits the position. Otherwise, no matter how many maxims you can recite, you’ll still play chess like you have a head full of mush.

The Casebook Method

How, then, could I learn to think like a chess player? Perhaps the same way that I and more than a century of American law students have learned to think like lawyers: the casebook method.

Pioneered by Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School from 1870 to 1895, the casebook method is the primary method of instruction for American students in their first year of law school (commonly called 1L). The method is centered around reading judicial opinions in selected cases—often chosen because of their memorable facts—and then discussing them in class.

To properly prepare for class, students must not only read the case, but also “brief” the case. Briefing a case begins by drafting a short summary of the essential facts that were necessary to decide the outcome.

The 1973 film The Paper Chase provides a memorable example, when, at the start of the film, the intimidating 1L Contracts instructor, Professor Kingsfield, summarizes the facts of the famous case Hawkins v. McGee (1929) for his unprepared student, James Hart:

Hawkins vs. McGee is a case in contract law, the subject of our study. A boy burned his hand by touching an electric wire. A doctor who was anxious to experiment in skin grafting asked to operate on the hand, guaranteeing that he would restore it 100%. He took a piece of skin from the boy’s chest and grafted it onto the unfortunate boy’s hand. The operation failed to produce a healthy hand. Instead, it produced a hairy hand, a hand not only burned but covered with dense matted hair.

Professor Kingsfield then proceeds to question the unfortunate Mr. Hart about the damages the doctor should pay the boy under these facts.

Being unprepared, Mr. Hart doesn’t do well (he withers under Professor Kingfield’s interrogation and vomits the moment he leaves the class). But had the questioning continued, Professor Kingsfield would have explored the legal principles governing remedies for breach of contract and how they applied to the facts of the case, forcing the student to explain not only what the court ruled but why it ruled that way (answers that also belong in the case brief). He might then have posed hypothetical questions about the case, exploring how differences in the facts might have led the court to reach a different outcome.

Through this process, students learn several related skills that are essential to the study and practice of law. They learn not just general rules, but also the reasons for and limits of those rules. They learn how to identify the “material facts” of a case—those that are most significant to the outcome of the case. And they learn how to identify the strengths and weaknesses of not only the arguments that were made, but the arguments that might have been made if the facts had been different.

Those skills are the core of what people mean when they talk about “thinking like a lawyer.” They’re also an awful lot like the skills at the core of “thinking like a chess player.” So if the casebook method works for law, why couldn’t it work for chess?

Applying the Casebook Method to Chess

This isn’t a radical idea. Indeed, it’s commonly agreed that one of the best ways to learn chess is to study instructive classic games. But the real question is how best to study those games and extract the most value from them.

This is something that I struggled with for years. I’d try to read annotated games and get bogged down in the variations. Or I’d try to play Guess the Move, an experience I found frustrating and tedious. At the end of either of these, I’d feel like I looked at a bunch of chess moves but hadn’t learned anything that would improve my thinking about chess.

It felt a lot like when I attended law school classes without having read and briefed the cases.

That realization was the lightbulb moment that changed my approach to studying classic games. Since then, I’ve started studying games the same way I studied cases, by briefing the game before exploring hypothetical variations. And the results have been remarkable. I not only get more out of each game, I enjoy studying classic games in a way I never did before.

It’s the first approach to studying classic games that has ever worked for me. And if you’ve struggled to learn from classic games, it’s an approach that might work for you, too.

In the next post, I’ll show you what this approach looks like, using a classic game between Frank Marshall and José Raúl Capablanca.