In the Field – The Development of Reasons in Criminal Proceedings (original) (raw)

The analysis and evaluation of legal argumentation: approaches from legal theory and argumentation theory

Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation, 2009

In the past thirty years legal argumentation has become an important interdisciplinary field of interest. The study of legal argumentation draws its data, assumptions and methods from disciplines such as legal theory, legal philosophy, logic, argumentation theory, rhetoric, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, sociology, and artificial intelligence. Researchers with different backgrounds and from various traditions are attempting to explain structural features of legal decision-making and justification from different points of view. The authors describe how argumentation theorists, philosophers, legal theorists, and legal philosophers deal with these problems from different points of view. The authors distinguish three traditions in the study of legal argumentation: the logical, the rhetorical and the dialogical approach. Ideas about the analysis and evaluation of legal argumentation, developed by influential authors in the field, are examined. The contribution is concluded with a more extensive discussion of the pragma-dialectical approach to legal argumentation that integrates rhetorical and dialectical aspects of legal argumentation.

Legal Argumentation: A Sociological Account

Jurisprudence, 2016

First of all, we need a concept of argumentation, which does not by definition include the elements of a justification, but enables us to inquire into the conditions for the possibilities and the function of reasoning. 1 For jurisprudence and legal theory the nature of legal argumentation is not a trivial question. Indeed, it sits on the fault line between the major schools of Anglo-American jurisprudence.

Studies on Argumentation and legal philosophy. Further Steps Towards a Pluralistic Approach: Preface

Studies on Argumentation and legal philosophy. Further Steps Towards a Pluralistic Approach, 2015

A fair number of relevant argumentative issues are discussed in this volume in the light of different perspectives of current legal philos-ophy: from a more “continental” approach to a clearly analytic one. The authors provide many insights, which are in part overlapping and in part not. A situation, which is typical in scientific literature and which must be regarded not as a limit, but as an opportunity.

Taking Judges Seriously: Argumentation and Rhetoric in Legal Decisions

Logical evidence in legal reasoning is one of the most important criteria for evaluat- ing the soundness and legal congruence of Courts’ decisions. In Italy such a princi- ple has been fixed in art. 360.1.5 CPC (the Italian Civil Procedure Code), art. 606.1.e CPP (the Italian Criminal Procedure Code) and by a number of judgments by the Supreme Court. Logical proof in Courts’ opinions is usually related to the paradigm of “legal syllogism”: a practical syllogism whose major premise is given by the statute law and whose minor one is given by the facts under judgment. In this article I argue that the premises of legal syllogisms are not precisely given, but rather built, thanks to an linked process of (rhetorical) argumentation. Such process can be divided into gradual steps, each of them logically reliable: my aim is to outline a preliminary de- scription of these phases as capable of being conceptualized and improved upon by the judge and to furnish a reliable scheme for Supreme Court judges, allowing them to check the logical consistency of lower Courts’ opinions. My aim is to provide law- yers and prosecutors with some recommendations, which may help them to achieve effective argumentation.

The analysis and evaluation of legal argumentation from a pragma-dialectical perspective

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1996

In the past thirty years legal argumentation has become an important interdisciplinary field of interest. The study of legal argumentation draws its data, assumptions and methods from disciplines such as legal theory, legal philosophy, logic, argumentation theory, rhetoric, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, sociology, and artificial intelligence. Researchers with different backgrounds and from various traditions are attempting to explain structural features of legal decision-making and justification from different points of view. The authors describe how argumentation theorists, philosophers, legal theorists, and legal philosophers deal with these problems from different points of view. The authors distinguish three traditions in the study of legal argumentation: the logical, the rhetorical and the dialogical approach. Ideas about the analysis and evaluation of legal argumentation, developed by influential authors in the field, are examined. The contribution is concluded with a more extensive discussion of the pragma-dialectical approach to legal argumentation that integrates rhetorical and dialectical aspects of legal argumentation.

Arguments and Stories in Legal Reasoning. The Case of Evidence Law

Archives for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 2020

We argue that legal argumentation, as the subject matter as well as a special subfield of Argumentation Studies (AS), has to be examined by making skilled use of the full panoply of tools such as argumentation and story schemes which are at the forefront of current work in AS. In reviewing the literature, we make explicit our own methodological choices (particularly regarding the place of normative deliberation in practical reasoning) and then illustrate the implications of such an approach through the analysis of a case study in the English law of evidence. We argue that a clear distinction must be drawn between practical argumentation and stories. Because of the institutional separation between legal judgment and fact-finding in common-law jury trials, we argue for the combination of argument and story-based analysis.

Legal Argumentation and Evidence

The purpose of this book is to provide a new method for analyzing the structure of legal reasoning used in arguing a case and evaluating legal argumentation in general. This book is intended to be of interest to those who work in the legal profession, as well as to those who teach law, but it is not a legal treatise. It takes a fresh look at the structure of legal reasoning by exploring current developments in argumentation theory.

Towards a Typology of Argumentation Based on Legal Principles

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

In this paper I analyze argumentation based on legal principles advanced in the justifica tion of legal decisions, explore the criteria for the assess ment of this type of argumentation and relate that to the general theory of law and legal argumentation. Starting from Alexy's principle theory and from the reactions some of his critics I will differentiate between various forms of argumentation based on legal principles.

Oddity of Legal Argumentation

2017

The current issue of IAS contains the written version of some of the talks given at the conference entitled „Legal Reasoning and Argumentation Theory” organized by the Philosophy and History of Science Department of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. A conference on this subject was indeed topical. There is no single field in which argumentation figures so prominently as in law, so it is no wonder that legal science has devoted so much attention to the nature of argumentation. On the other side, scholars interested in the analysis of argument and debate have looked on legal reasoning as a model. Nevertheless, argumentation theory, which has emerged as a unified albeit heterogeneous field in the last few decades, has still not provided a penetrating analysis of legal reasoning. We believe that the recent and sophisticated analyses developed by legal scholars and the current theoretical models and analytic devices in argumentation theory may help each other to produc...