Legal Argumentation Theory: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

This book offers its readers an overview of recent developments in the theory of legal argumentation written by representatives from various disciplines, including argumentation theory, philosophy of law, logic and artificial intelligence. It presents an overview of contributions representative of different academic and legal cultures, and different continents and countries. The book contains contributions on strategic maneuvering, argumentum ad absurdum, argumentum ad hominem, consequentialist argumentation, weighing and balancing, the relation between legal argumentation and truth, the distinction between the context of discovery and context of justification, and the role of constitutive and regulative rules in legal argumentation. It is based on a selection of papers that were presented in the special workshop on Legal Argumentation organized at the 25th IVR World Congress for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy held 15-20 August 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany.

Table of Contents. - Introduction; Christian Dahlman and Eveline Feteris. - Reasoning by Consequences: Applying Different Argumentation Structures to the Analysis of Consequentialist Reasoning in Judicial Decisions; Flavia Carbonell. - On the Argumentum ad Absurdum Statutory Interpretation: its Uses and Normative Significance; Thomas Bustamante. - Why precedent in law (and elsewhere) is not totally (or even substantially) about analogy; Frederick Schauer. - Fallacies in Ad Hominem Arguments; Christian Dahlman, David Reidhav and Lena Wahlberg. - The Rule of Law and the Ideal of a Critical Discussion; Harm Kloosterhuis. - Strategic Maneuvering with the Argumentative Role of Legal Principles in the Case of the Unworthy Spouse ; Eveline Feteris. - Legal argumentation and the normativity of legal Norms; Carlos Bernal. - Weighing and Balancing in the Light of Deliberation and Expression; Bruce Anderson. - Construction or reconstruction? On the Function of Argumentation in the Law; Jaap Hage. - The Argument from Psychological Typology for a Mild Separation between the Context of Discovery and the Context of Justification; Marko Novak. - Constitutive Rules and Coherence in Legal Argumentation: The Case of Extensive and Restrictive Interpretation; Antonino Rotolo and Corrado Roversi. - Is Balancing a Method of Rational Justification sui generis? ; Jan Sieckmann. - Arguing on Facts. Truth, Trials and Adversary Procedures. ; Giovanni Tuzet. - Index.