How Logic Is Spoken of at the European Court of Justice: A Preliminary Exploration

Abstracts

If we wish to ascertain how a court of law makes use of logic the only material generally available for such investigations is found in the texts containing the reasoning of judgment and, where provided for by procedure, minority votes. In these texts we find logic sometimes in the form of an authority which is named and invoked explicitly and sometimes in that of a benchmark which is referred to implicitly. If we want to work our way up to the more complex aspects it makes sense to start out at a simpler level by analysing explicit references to logic. This essay limits itself to just that, by studying certain decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and in those decisions looking at the contexts of the terms “logic”, “logical” and “logically”. For the overview of logical relations to be complete we would also need to study implicit logical references, but that is an extremely complex and extensive research programme which would require complete logical analysis of all the decisions.

Dedicated to Professor Dr. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Georg Ress.

Prof. Dr. Maximilian Herberger is managing director of the Institut für Rechtsinformatik (IfRI) at the University of Saarland, http://rechtsinformatik.de, co-leader of the Juridical Internet Project Saarbrücken (JIPS), http://www.jura.uni-sb.de, and editor of the free Internet law and computing sciences publication JurPC, http://www.jurpc.de.