Use of argumentation methods applied to legal reasoning is a relatively new field of study. The book provides a survey of the leading problems, and outlines how future research using argumentation-based methods show great promise of leading to useful solutions. The problems studied include not only these of argument evaluation and argument invention, but also analysis of specific kinds of evidence commonly used in law, like witness testimony, circumstantial evidence, forensic evidence and character evidence. New tools for analyzing these kinds (...) of evidence are introduced. (shrink)

Seeing that socio-legal theory has produced a number of compelling grand theories about law’s development as a body of knowledge, this contribution analyzes legal evolution on the micro-level of decision-making in concrete cases. To that end, law finding is reconstructed as a three stage process of reason-based rule-construction. Legal evolution is argued to stem from the argumentative jumps that are made in this process in order to use what is initially drawn from the body of legal knowledge in new cases. (...) These jumps are justified by additional reasoning that plays a crucial role in that it brings new information to the law finding process. It is explained how this new information gets incorporated in the body of knowledge as a result of discursive maneuvers of legal practitioners. (shrink)

This article describes the Vaccine/Injury Project Corpus, a collection of legal decisions awarding or denying compensation for health injuries allegedly due to vaccinations, together with models of the logical structure of the reasoning of the factfinders in those cases. This unique corpus provides useful data for formal and informal logic theory, for natural-language research in linguistics, and for artificial intelligence research. More importantly, the article discusses lessons learned from developing protocols for manually extracting the logical structure and generating the logic (...) models. It identifies sub-tasks in the extraction process, discusses challenges to automation, and provides insights into possible solutions for automation. In particular, the framework and strategies developed here, together with the corpus data, should allow “top–down” and contextual approaches to automation, which can supplement “bottom-up” linguistic approaches. Illustrations throughout the article use examples drawn from the Corpus. (shrink)

I shall compare two views of legal concepts: as nodes in inferential nets and as categories in an ontology (a conceptual architecture). Firstly, I shall introduce the inferential approach, consider its implications, and distinguish the mere possession of an inferentially defined concept from the belief in the concept’s applicability, which also involves the acceptance of the concept’s constitutive inferences. For making this distinction, the inferential and eliminative analysis of legal concepts proposed by Alf Ross will be connected to the views (...) on theoretical concepts in science advanced by Frank Ramsey and Rudolf Carnap. Consequently, the mere comprehension of a legal concept will be distinguished from the application of the concept to a particular legal system, since application presupposes a doctrinal commitment, namely, the belief that the inferences constituting the concept hold in that system. Then, I shall consider how concepts can be characterised by defining the corresponding terms and placing them within an ontology. Finally, I shall argue that there is a tension between the inferential and the ontological approach, but that both need to be taken into account, to capture the meaning and the cognitive function of legal concepts. (shrink)

In this contribution the author develops an argumentation model for the reconstruction of weighing and balancing on the basis of teleological-evaluative considerations. The model is intended as a heuristic and critical tool for the rational reconstruction of the justification of judicial decisions. From the perspective of a rational discussion, it makes explicit the choices underlying the weighing and balancing on the basis of goals and values so that they can be made explicit and submitted to rational critique.

The paper consists of three parts. In the first part five kinds of defeasibility are distinguished that is ontological, conceptual, epistemic, justification and logical defeasibility. In the second part it is argued that from these, justification defeat is the phenomenon that plays a role in legal reasoning. In the third part, the view is defended that non-monotonic logics are not necessary to model justification defeat, but that they are so to speak the natural way to model this phenomenon.

The notions of inference and default are used in pragmatics with different meanings, resulting in theoretical disputes that emphasize the differences between the various pragmatic approaches. This paper is aimed at showing how the terminological and theoretical differences concerning the two aforementioned terms result from taking into account inference and default from different points of view and levels of analysis. Such differences risk making a dialogue between the theories extremely difficult. However, at a functional level of analysis the different theories, (...) definitions, and approaches to interpretation can be compared and integrated. At this level, the standardization of pragmatic inferences can be regarded as the development of a specific type of presumptions, used to draw prima-facie interpretations. (shrink)

. While courts depend on expert opinions in reaching sound judgments, the role of the expert witness in legal proceedings is associated with a litany of problems. Perhaps most prevalent is the question of under what circumstances should testimony be admitted as expert opinion. We review the changing policies adopted by American courts in an attempt to ensure the reliability and usefulness of the scientific and technical information admitted as evidence. We argue that these admissibility criteria are best seen in (...) a dialectical context as a set of critical questions of the kind commonly used in models of argumentation. (shrink)

In legal theory, it is widely claimed that decisions in hard cases are based on weighing and balancing. However no reconstructions are given of the deep structure of the complex argumentation underlying the justification of these decisions. The author develops a model for the analysis of weighing and balancing of arguments in the justification of judicial decisions that are based on teleological-evaluative considerations. The justification is reconstructed as a complex argumentation that consists of different levels of argumentation and it is (...) explained how these levels of argumentation relate to the burden of proof of a judge who gives a decision that is based on a weighing and balancing in which teleological-evaluative considerations are invoked. (shrink)

While defeasibility in legal reasoning has been the subject of recent scholarship, it has yet to be studied in the context of judicial opinion. Yet, being subject to appeal, judicial decisions can default for a variety of reasons. Prakken (2001) argued that the defeasibility affecting reasoning involved in adversarial legal argumentation is best analysed as procedural rather than logical. In this paper we argue that the defeasibility of ratio decendi is similarly best explained and modeled in a procedural and dialectical (...) framework. We propose that appeals are best understood as meta-dialogues about the reasoned dialogue occurring in the initial trial. (shrink)

The phenomenon of defeasibility has long been a central theme in legal literature. This essay aims to shed new light on that phenomenon by clarifying some fundamental conceptual issues. First, the most widespread definition of legal defeasibility is examined and criticized. The essay shows that such a definition is poorly constructed, inaccurate and generates many problems. Indeed, the definition hides the close relationship between legal defeasibility and legal interpretation. Second, this essay argues that no new definition is needed. I will (...) show that from an interpretative standpoint, there is nothing special about legal defeasibility. Contrary to what some authors maintain, no unique or privileged source of legal defeasibility exists, nor are there privileged arguments to justify it. Specifically, legal defeasibility refers to interpretative outcomes deriving from interpretative arguments that, on the one hand, are very different from one another, and, on the other, are often employed to justify different interpretative outcomes. In the legal field, the problems related to defeasibility have little in common with the problems that this label covers in other areas—such as logic or epistemology—and they are nothing but the well-known problems related to legal interpretation. In conclusion, this paper argues that as far as legal argumentation is concerned, the notion of legal defeasibility lacks explanatory power, and it should be abandoned. (shrink)

While courts depend on expert opinions in reaching sound judgments, the role of the expert witness in legal proceedings is associated with a litany of problems. Perhaps most prevalent is the question of under what circumstances should testimony be admitted as expert opinion. We review the changing policies adopted by American courts in an attempt to ensure the reliability and usefulness of the scientific and technical information admitted as evidence. We argue that these admissibility criteria are best seen in a (...) dialectical context as a set of critical questions of the kind commonly used in models of argumentation. (shrink)

. I will argue that the concept of law is a normative notion, irreducible to any factual description. Its conceptual function is that of relating certain properties a norm may possess to the conclusion that the norm is legally binding, namely, that it deserves to be endorsed and applied in legal reasoning. Legal validity has to be distinguished from other, more demanding, normative ideas, such as moral bindingness or legal optimality.