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What Is Legal Reasoning About: A Jurisprudential Account

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Economics in Legal Reasoning

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Institutions, Economics and Law ((PSIEL))

Abstract

Legal reasoning is about the creation, application, and extinction of legal norms (rules, standards, or principles). Legislators and lawmakers argue about the creation and extinction of norms, or, more technically, about the enactment and abrogation of norms by the competent legal authorities. Judges and other officials argue about the application of norms, on the basis of the interpretation of the relevant legal texts.

In the judicial context, in particular, participants make arguments about the relevant facts and the application of law to these facts. Legal arguments divide into evidentiary and interpretive ones, where the former point at the reconstruction of what happened and the latter point at the ways in which legal texts can be interpreted. Both are necessary in the application of law.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    However, there are some uses of “arguing” that refer to solitary meditation and decision-making. Daniel Defoe represents Robison Crusoe as “arguing with himself” about what to do with the savages (e.g. Chaps. XII and XIV of Crusoe’s novel).

  2. 2.

    See, for example, Wintgens and Oliver-Lalana (2013).

  3. 3.

    For a variety of views, see Bongiovanni et al. (2018). Two classics are MacCormick (1978) and Golding (1980). See also Alchourrón (1996), Sartor (2005), Posner (2008), and Schauer (2009).

  4. 4.

    In general, judges are not bound by the arguments given by the parties, in the sense that they are not required by the law to ground their rulings on them. Yet, the arguments provided by the parties are usually the starting point of judicial reasoning, the materials from which judges draw up their decisions.

  5. 5.

    The lists of arguments differ to some extent. For instance, Walton et al. (2018, pp. 521–522) distinguish the following: (1) argument from ordinary meaning, (2) argument from technical meaning, (3) argument from contextual harmonization, (4) argument from precedent, (5) argument from statutory analogy, (6) argument from a legal concept, (7) argument from general principles, (8) argument from history, (9) argument from purpose, (10) argument from substantive reasons, and (11) argument from intention.

  6. 6.

    The notion of relevance is a tricky one. Suffice it here to say that some consequences are “legally relevant” if they meet some legal desiderata. In this sense, legal relevance is not to be confused with logical, political, or economic relevance.

  7. 7.

    For more details on Posner’s views, see Cserne (2020). On “discretion” suffice it to say that judges have discretion when the law does not already regulate a certain issue; then they are expected to adjudicate it according to prudence as practical wisdom (Hart 2013), or to principles (Dworkin 1978, 1985), or to other valuable considerations such as economic ones.

  8. 8.

    See Wróblewski (1971, 1974); Alexy (1978). Cf. MacCormick (1978) for similar points.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Milan, Italy

    Damiano Canale & Giovanni Tuzet

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  1. Damiano Canale
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  2. Giovanni Tuzet
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Correspondence to Giovanni Tuzet .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Péter Cserne

  2. Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

    Fabrizio Esposito

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Canale, D., Tuzet, G. (2020). What Is Legal Reasoning About: A Jurisprudential Account. In: Cserne, P., Esposito, F. (eds) Economics in Legal Reasoning. Palgrave Studies in Institutions, Economics and Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40168-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40168-9_2

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