[2] He was a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada, and before that (2008–2014), he held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor.

Walton's work has been used to better prepare legal arguments and to help develop artificial intelligence.

Walton's work represents a distinctive approach built around a set of practical methods to help a user identify, analyze, and evaluate arguments in specialized areas such as law and science, as well as arguments of the kind used in everyday conversational discourse.

Walton has called this approach logical argumentation, and as a method it has twelve defining characteristics, shown below in a simplified list.

In the method, schemes work as heuristic devices that only offer presumptive support of a claim that may have to be withdrawn as new evidence comes in.