This paper provides a typology of appeals to authority, identifying three distinct types: that which is based on a command; that which is based on expertise; and that which is based on dignity. Each type is distinguished with respect to the reaction that a failure to follow it ordinarily evokes. The rhetorical roots of Locke's ad verecundiam are traced to the rhetorical practices of ancient Rome.

I argue that there is no fallacy of argument from authority. I first show the weakness of the case for there being such a fallacy: text-book presentations are confused, alleged examples are not genuinely exemplary, reasons given for its alleged fallaciousness are not convincing. Then I analyse arguing from authority as a complex speech act. Rejecting the popular but unjustified category of the "part-time fallacy", I show that bad arguments which appeal to authority are defective through breach of some felicity (...) condition on argument as a speech act, not through employing a bad principle of inference. (shrink)

This paper shows how the critical questions matching an argumentation scheme can be mod-eled in the Carneades argumentation system as three kinds of premises. Ordinary premises hold only if they are supported by sufficient arguments. Assumptions hold, by default, until they have been questioned. With exceptions the negation holds, by default, until the exception has been supported by sufficient arguments. By “sufficient arguments”, we mean arguments sufficient to satisfy the applicable proof standard.

This article discusses the nature of persuasive authorities in the common law, and argues that many of them are best understood in terms of their (being regarded) as having theoretical rather than practical authorities for the courts that cite them. The contrast between theoretical and practical authority is examined at length in order to support the view that the treatment of many persuasive authorities by courts is more consistent with this view. Finally, it is argued that if persuasive authorities are (...) best understood as theoretical authorities, this raises difficulties for both positivistic and interpretivist theories of law. (shrink)

There is a remarkable difference between that which Anglo-American legal philosophers more or less unanimously regard as their subject matter and that which prominent Continental writers have emphasized as one of the main topics for jurisprudential discussion. The latter have often directed their attention to something quite specific: not law or the aforementioned law-related phenomena, but the study of law, or legal scholarship. In particular, Continental writers have been interested in legal scholarship as it is characteristically produced by law teachers. (...) Some phrases that may be used to describe this type of scholarship are “doctrinal legal scholarship”, “legal dogmatics”, and “legal science in a narrow a sense”. This paper explains why Anglo-American theorists should keep their minds open to the idea that jurisprudence may take the doctrinal study of law as its subject matter. It also attempts to explain what doctrinal legal scholarship is, and thus engages in precisely the type of jurisprudential inquiry that it is out to promote. (shrink)