Informatics And The Foundations Of Legal Reasoning

Informatics and the Foundations of Legal Reasoning represents a close collaboration between a wide range of disciplines and countries. Fourteen papers, together with a long analytical introduction by the editors, were selected from the contributions of legal theorists, computer scientists, philosophers and logicians who were members of an International Working Group supported by the European Commission. The Group was mandated to work towards determining how far the law is amenable to formal modeling, and in what ways computers might assist legal thinking and practice. The book is the result of discussions held by the Group over two and half years. It will help students and researchers from different backgrounds to focus on a common set of topics of increasing general interest. It embodies the results of work in progress and suggests many issues for further discussion. A stimulating text for undergraduate and graduate courses in law, philosophy and computer science departments, as well as for those interested in the place of computers in legal practice, especially at the international level.

This book is a revised and extended version of my PhD Thesis 'Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument', which I defended on 14 January 1993 at the Free University Amsterdam. The first five chapters of the thesis have remained almost completely unchanged but the other chapters have undergone considerable revision and expansion. Most importantly, I have replaced the formal argument-based system of the old Chapters 6, 7 and 8 with a revised and extended system, whieh I have developed during the last three years in collaboration with Giovanni Sartor. Apart from some technical improvements, the main additions to the old system are the enriehment of its language with a nonprovability operator, and the ability to formalise reasoning about preference criteria. Moreover, the new system has a very intuitive dialectieal form, as opposed to the rather unintuitive fixed-point appearance of the old system. Another important revision is the split of the old Chapter 9 into two new chapters. The old Section 9. 1 on related research has been updated and expanded into a whole chapter, while the rest of the old chapter is now in revised form in Chapter 10. This chapter also contains two new contributions, a detailed discussion of Gordon's Pleadings Game, and a general description of a multi-Iayered overall view on the structure of argu mentation, comprising a logieal, dialectical, procedural and strategie layer. Finally, in the revised conclusion I have paid more attention to the relevance of my investigations for legal philosophy and argumentation theory.

What can we say about justice in a pluralist world? Is there some universal justice? Are there universal human rights? What is the function of the state in the modern world? Such are the problems dealt with by the 20th world congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (Amsterdam, June 2001) and published in this book, which is for legal and social philosophers, students of human rights, and political philosophers.

This Palgrave Pivot is the first book in the field of Law & Economics looking at the relationship between economics and law in legal reasoning. The book constitutes a reference point for the economic analysis of legal institutions, as legal reasoning remains the dimension of legal systems least explored by economists. Despite their differences, economics and legal reasoning interact in many interesting ways. This book offers a fast track to these interactions. Both supporters and critics of Law & Economics will be exposed to a yet-to-be developed area of interaction between the disciplines. This book will be of interest to economists, legal scholars, and Law and Economics specialists, and can be used as teaching material in courses on Law & Economics and legal reasoning as well.

When a legal rule requires us to drive on the right, notarize our wills, or refrain from selling bootleg liquor, how are we to describe and understand that requirement? In particular, how does the logical form of such a requirement relate to the logical form of other requirements, such as moral requirements, or the requirements of logic itself? When a general legal rule is applied or distinguished in a particular case, how can we describe that process in logical form? Such questions have come to preoccupy modern legal philosophy as its methodology, drawing on the philosophy of logic, becomes ever more sophisticated. This collection gathers together some of the most prominent legal philosophers in the Anglo-American and civil law traditions to analyse the logical structure of legal norms. They focus on the issue of defeasibility, which has become a central concern for both logicians and legal philosophers in recent years. The book is divided into four parts. The first section is devoted to unravelling the basic concepts related to legal defeasibility and the logical structure of legal norms, focusing on the idea that law, or its components, are liable to implicit exceptions, which cannot be specified before the law's application to particular cases. Part two aims to disentangle the main relations between the issue of legal defeasibility and the issue of legal interpretation, exploring the topic of defeasibility as a product of certain argumentative techniques in the law. Section 3 of the volume is dedicated to one of the most problematic issues in the history of jurisprudence: the connections between law and morality. Finally, section 4 of the volume is devoted to analysing the relationships between defeasibility and legal adjudication.

Bringing together world-class scholars who have devoted themselves to the study of legal obligation, this book addresses key dimensions of the current debate: providing novel insights and perspectives, as well as critically discussing the leading theories of legal obligation. The notion of legal obligation is widely regarded as fundamental by both legal practitioners and legal theorists. For the language that explicitly refers to obligation is pervasive insofar as paradigmatic legal materials make reference to obligation either directly, by specifying what a subject is obligated to do, or indirectly, by attributing rights, privileges, powers, permissions, and other normative statuses to both single individuals and groups. There is, then, broad agreement that obligation constitutes a central element in legal studies. At the same time, however, there is considerable disagreement among contemporary legal theorists about how legal obligation can or should be elucidated. This book accounts for both the significance of obligation in law and the variety of views of legal obligation championed in legal philosophy today. With contributions from renowned theorists, this book will be invaluable for scholars and students of legal theory, legal philosophy, and jurisprudence.

This paperback edition of the first of the twelve volumes of A Treatises of Legal Philosophy and General Jurisprudence, serves as an introduction to the first-ever multivolume treatment of all important issues in legal philosophy and general jurisprudence, consisting of a five-volume theoretical part and a six-volume historical part. The theoretical part covers the main topics of contemporary debate. The historical volumes trace the development of legal thought from ancient Greek times through the twentieth century. All volumes are edited by the renowned theorist Enrico Pattaro.

Analytical jurisprudence has been mostly silent on the role of precedent in legal adjudication. What is the content of a judge's precedent ideology,or the rule of precedent-recognition, by means of which the ratio of a case is to be distinguished from mere dicta? In this study, the author identifies six types of judicial precedent-ideology, among them judicial legislation, systemic construction of the underlying reasons of law in the Dworkinian sense, and a radical re-evaluation of the merits of a prior case in later adjudication, as envisioned by the American Realists. These competing models are tested against judicial experiences in the UK, US, France, Italy, Germany and Finland. By this means Lon Fuller's famous 'internal morality of law' is shown to function rather poorly in the context of precedents, and the author therefore suggests a redefinition of the rule which makes it work for precedent. This, in turn leads the author to confront fundamental questions about the normative nature of law. Is Kelsen's grundnorm or Hart's ultimate rule of recognition a valid rule, in the image of legal rules proper, or is it merely a social fact, observable only in the practices and behaviour of judges and other officials? The author claims that Hart is caught between Kelsen and J.L. Borges, the late Argentinian fabulist, in so far as the ontology and epistemology of the rule of recognition are concerned. This leads the author to the conclusion that the two predicaments affecting analytical positivism, namely the threat of endless self-referentiality, or infinite regress, can only be accounted for by means of recourse to the philosophy of deconstruction as posited by Jacques Derrida.