Abstracts
Legal argumentation is in contention.1 I shall assume that the dominant position in contemporary writing in the field purports that a theory of such argumentation is mainly concerned with how actors of the judicial process effectively make a case for their thesis, that such argumentation includes elements of morals, that it is defeasable,2 i.e. that it may be or even has to be revised against new arguments or circumstances. I shall try to make a brief case for the opposite position. My thesis is first that valid legal argument is either an interpretative explanation or a justification of a decision within the limits of admitted discretion, second that many things which dominant legal theory presents as legal argument is not valid and aims at producing law by purporting to describe it. I what follows, I shall try to show the following theses: (1) Legal explanation is specifically easy and unspecifically difficult. (2) Legal justification is practically, not theoretically difficult. (3) The main anti-positivist strategy consists in making practical problems appear as theoretical problems. (4) This position leads to more difficulties than alternative positivist conceptions. In order to make my case, I shall first introduce the practice of arguments aiming at modifying law through the appearance of explanation by a famous example (I), I shall then outline a classification of legal arguments (II), and finally introduce the class of s-arguments (III).
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Notes
- 1.
It largely exceeds the scope of this paper if only to outline some of the main trends in present research. To quote just but a few cf. Aarnio A (1977). On Legal Reasoning. Turku: Turun Yliopisto; Aarnio A (1987). The rational as reasonable: A treatise on legal justification. Dordrecht, Reidel; Aarnio A, Alexy R, Peczenik A (1981). The foundation of legal reasoning. Rechtstheorie 21, 133–158, 257–279, 423–448; Alexy R (1989). Eine Theorie der juristischen Argumentation, Suhrkamp Frankfurt am Main 1978 (Engl.: A theory of legal argumentation: The theory of rational discourse as theory of legal justification, Oxford Clarendon Press; van Eemeren F, Grootendorst R (1992). Argumentation, communication, and Fallacies. A pragma-dialectical perspective. Hillsdale NJ: Erlbaum; La Torre M (2002). Theories of legal argumentation and concepts of law. An approximation. Ratio Juris 15, 377–402; Hage J (1997). Reasoning with Rules: an Essay on Legal Reasoning and its Underlying Logic, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht,; Peczenik A (1989). On law and Reason. Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers; Prakken H (2004). Analysing reasoning about evidence with formal models of argumentation. Law, Probability and Risk 3, 33–50.
- 2.
Prakken H and Sartor G (2004). The three faces of defeasibility in the law. Ratio Juris 17, 118–139.
- 3.
“(1) Jeder hat das Recht, seine Meinung in Wort, Schrift und Bild frei zu äußern und zu verbreiten und sich aus allgemein zugänglichen Quellen ungehindert zu unterrichten. Die Pressefreiheit und die Freiheit der Berichterstattung durch Rundfunk und Film werden gewährleistet. Eine Zensur findet nicht statt.
(2) Diese Rechte finden ihre Schranken in den Vorschriften der allgemeinen Gesetze, den gesetzlichen Bestimmungen zum Schutze der Jugend und in dem Recht der persönlichen Ehre.”
- 4.
He is namely the director of “Jud Süß” (1940) an anti-Semitic reinterpretation of the story of Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (1692–1738) and “Kolberg” (1944), a film aiming at justifying war until the very last breath. With “Unsterbliche Geliebte” (1951), he tried to re-establish himself as film-director in post-war Germany.
- 5.
BVerfGE 7, 198
- 6.
The Lüth case has enticed an immense amount of commentaries and the usual analysis of its significance for the case law of the Court can be found in any textbook of German constitutional law. For a historical contextualisation, cf. Thomas Henne, Arne Riedlinger (eds.): Das Lüth-Urteil in (rechts-) historischer Sicht. Die Grundlegung der Grundrechtsjudikatur in den 1950er Jahren. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004;
- 7.
Notably § 826 BGB which serves as the legal basis for the order of the Hamburg Landgericht. This provision reads: “Wer in einer gegen die guten Sitten verstoßenden Weise einem anderen vorsätzlich Schaden zufügt, ist dem anderen zum Ersatz des Schadens verpflichtet.” (Who is offending someone else intentionally in a way contrary to good manners is liable to pay for the damage).
- 8.
This is the main difference between the American and the European System of constitutional review: whereas in the American system all courts disapply unconstitutional provisions without annulling them, in the European system, first introduced in the Austrian Constitution in 1920, special constitutional courts are exclusively entitled to quash legislative provisions infringing the formal constitution.
- 9.
“19 (2) In no case may a basic right be infringed upon in its essential content.”
- 10.
See e.g. Sweet AS and McCown M. Discretion and Precedent in European Law. In Wiklund O (ed) Judicial Discretion in European Perspective. Stockholm: Kluwer Law International, pp. 84–115. With Brunell T. The European Courts and the National Courts: A Statistical Analysis of Preliminary References, 1961–95. Journal of European Public Policy 5, 66–97. For a systematic presentation of such an evolution: same author, The Judicial Construction of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- 11.
This is notably the view held by Hart H (1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford Clarendon Press (1994, 2nd ed), pp. 126 or Kelsen H (1961). Reine Rechtslehre, Vienna (2nd ed), p. 346.
- 12.
This very traditional argument against positivism is famously couched in a new terminology by Dworkin R (1977). Taking Rights Seriously., London: Duckworth, p. 22.
- 13.
This is notably the position of Henry Prakken who considers his highly interesting contributions as ways of making law more rational or as showing us litigation as a game using defeasable arguments (cf. his contribution to the present volume or Prakken H (2004). Analysing reasoning about evidence with formal models of argumentation. Law, Probability and Risk 3, 33–50; Prakken H and Sartor G (1997). A dialectical model of assessing conflicting arguments in legal reasoning. In Prakken H and Sartor G (eds) Logical Models of Legal Argumentation. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 175–212). See also Gordon TF (1995). The Pleadings Game – An Artificial Intelligence Model of Procedural Justice. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers; This view, as I have tried to show elsewhere (see e.g. Pfersmann O (2001). « Ontologie des normes juridiques et argumentation », in : Otto Pfersmann, Gérard Timsit (eds.), Raisonenment juridique et interprétation, Publications de la Sorbonne, pp. 11–34), rests on a confusion of the way in which argumentation may factually work in a given case or set of cases – outside any reference to a given legal framework – and the way in which argument is framed and constrained by already established legal norms
- 14.
These questions are set forth with more detail and discussion of controversial claims in Pfersmann O (1995). Pour une typologie modale de classes de validité normative. In Petit J-L (ed) La querelle des normes — Hommage à Georg Henrik von Wright, Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique de l‘Université de Caen, no. 27, p. 69–113.
- 15.
William Shakespeare, King Lear, I,1.
- 16.
I present my theory concerning these points in detail in: „Pour une typologie modale de classes de validité normative“, (note 14).
- 17.
Again, I don‘t mean this of course to deny the interest of highly developed and sophisticated research, quoted above, especially in Law and Artificial Intelligence, which opposes my approach. The point is that these contributions try to formalise argument as it appears in practical litigation and legal practice, from the perspective of participants. They don‘t aim at analysing the law as such, but discourse about law and arguments used in order to win a case. If it is relevant, it is not relevant, all things equal, as a neutral and scientific analysis of law. The fact that such a discourse exists in legal practice is undeniable; it makes no case for the impossibility of a neutral analysis of the law itself. These points are elaborated in more detail in Pfersmann O (2005). Le sophisme onomastique. A propos de l‘interprétation de la constitution. In Soucramamien FM (ed) L‘interprétation constitutionnelle ( Collection Thèmes et commentaires ). Paris: Dalloz, pp 33–60.
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Pfersmann, O. (2010). Explanation and Production: Two Ways of Using and Constructing Legal Argumentation. In: Gabbay, D., Canivez, P., Rahman, S., Thiercelin, A. (eds) Approaches to Legal Rationality. Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science, vol 20. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9588-6_14
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