Legal Argument

Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy is a full-featured guide designed primarily for law students in research, writing, analysis and trial advocacy classes and moot court programs. Inside you'll find detailed explanations of how lawyers construct legal arguments and practical guidelines to the process of molding the raw materials of litigation--cases, statutes, testimony, documents, common sense--into instruments of persuasive advocacy. You'll also find writing guidelines that show you how to present a well-constructed legal argument in writing in a way that legal decision makers will find persuasive. The centerpiece of this indispensable work is its syllogism-based step-by-step method, designed to walk the advocate through the process of crafting a winning argument. Intuitive organization presents the material in five parts: Part I sets out a general methodology for constructing legal arguments. Part II focuses more closely on the construction of persuasive, well-grounded legal premises, and covers the effective integration of legal doctrine and evidence into the argument's structure. Part III shows how to put the method to work by giving two detailed examples of the construction of complete legal arguments from scratch. Part IV provides a detailed protocol for reducing well-constructed legal arguments to written form, along with a concrete illustration of that process. It also provides concrete advice on how to recognize and avoid a host of common mistakes in the written presentation of legal arguments. Part V moves from the basics into more advanced techniques of persuasive legal argument, including rhetorical tactics like framing and emphasis, how to respond to arguments, maintaining professionalism in advocacy, and the ethical limits of argument.

Organized simply and logically, The Five Types of Legal Argument shows readers how to identify, create, attack, and evaluate the five types of legal arguments (text, intent, precedent, tradition and policy). It also describes how to weave the arguments together to make them more persuasive and how to attack legal arguments.In this book, Huhn demonstrates exactly why the legal reasoning in a case is difficult to analyze. Each type of legal argument has a different structure and draws upon different evidence of what the law is. Thus this book does not merely introduce readers to law and legal reasoning, but shows how the five different legal arguments are constructed so that various strategies can be developed for attacking each one.

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.

The International Court of Justice at The Hague is the principal judicial organ of the UN, and the successor of the Permanent Court of International Justice (1923–1946), which was the first real permanent court of justice at the international level. This 2005 book analyses the groundbreaking contribution of the Permanent Court to international law, both in terms of judicial technique and the development of legal principle. The book draws on archival material left by judges and other persons involved in the work of the Permanent Court, giving fascinating insights into many of its most important decisions and the individuals who made them (Huber, Anzilotti, Moore, Hammerskjöld and others). At the same time it examines international legal argument in the Permanent Court, basing its approach on a developed model of international legal argument that stresses the intimate relationships between international and national lawyers and between international and national law.

"Modeling Legal Argument "provides a comprehensive treatment of case-based reasoning and a detailed description of a computer program called Hypo, that models the way attorneys argue with cases, real and hypothetical. The program offers significant advantages over "keyword" case retrieval systems in the legal field and demonstrates how to design expert systems that assist the user by presenting reasonable alternative answers on all sides of an issue and by citing case examples to explain their advice.Hypo analyzes problem situations dealing with trade secrets disputes, retrieves relevant legal cases from its database and fashions them into reasonable legal arguments about who should win. The arguments demonstrate the program's ability to reason symbolically with past cases, to draw factual analogies between cases, to cite them in arguments, to distinguish them, and to pose counter-examples and hypotheticals based on past cases."Modeling Legal Argument "discusses the law as a paradigm of case-based argument, introduces Hypo and its adversarial reasoning process, provides an overview of the Hypo program, and gives extended examples of the model's reasoning capabilities. It describes the case knowledge base, a dimensional index, basic mechanisms of case-based reasoning, and offers a theory of case-based argument in Hypo. Ashley evaluates Hypo's performance and takes up adversarial case-based reasoning beyond the law and extensions of the Hypo model.Kevin D. Ashley is a Research Scientist at the Learning Research an Development Center and Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh. "Modeling Legal Argument is "included in the Artificial Intelligence and Legal Reasoning series, edited by L. Thorne McCarty and Edwina L. Rissland.

This book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To evaluate an argument correctly one must be able to distinguish the sound instances of a certain argument type from its unsound instances. This book promotes the development of theoretical tools for this task.

This collection contains studies on justice, juridical reasoning and argumenta tion which contributed to my ideas on the new rhetoric. My reflections on justice, from 1944 to the present day, have given rise to various studies. The ftrst of these was published in English as The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1963). The others, of which several are out of print or have never previously been published, are reunited in the present volume. As justice is, for me, the prime example of a "confused notion", of a notion which, like many philosophical concepts, cannot be reduced to clarity without being distorted, one cannot treat it without recourse to the methods of reasoning analyzed by the new rhetoric. In actuality, these methods have long been put into practice by jurists. Legal reasoning is fertile ground for the study of argumentation: it is to the new rhetoric what mathematics is to formal logic and to the theory of demonstrative proof. It is important, then, that philosophers should not limit their methodologi cal studies to mathematics and the natural sciences. They must not neglect law in the search for practical reason. I hope that these essays lead to be a better understanding of how law can enrich philosophical thought. CH. P.

A leading expert in informal logic, Douglas Walton turns his attention in this new book to how reasoning operates in trials and other legal contexts, with special emphasis on the law of evidence. The new model he develops, drawing on methods of argumentation theory that are gaining wide acceptance in computing fields like artificial intelligence, can be used to identify, analyze, and evaluate specific types of legal argument. In contrast with approaches that rely on deductive and inductive logic and rule out many common types of argument as fallacious, Walton&’s aim is to provide a more expansive view of what can be considered &"reasonable&" in legal argument when it is construed as a dynamic, rule-governed, and goal-directed conversation. This dialogical model gives new meaning to the key notions of relevance and probative weight, with the latter analyzed in terms of pragmatic criteria for what constitutes plausible evidence rather than truth.