Abstract
The pragma-dialectical approach to legal argumentation conceives the justification of a judicial decision as part of a critical discussion. In this approach it is assumed that a legal argumentation theory should integrate descriptive and normative perspectives on argumentation. Legal discourse should be studied as a sample of normal verbal communication and interaction and it should at the same time, be measured against certain standards of reasonableness. This implies first a philosophical ideal of reasonableness, second a theoretical model for acceptable argumentation and third tools to analyze actual legal argumentation from the perspective of the model. Analyzing argumentation in judicial decisions from the ideal-perspective of a critical discussion is sometimes criticized. One of the main objections is that a judge does not have a standpoint in a critical discussion, but simply decides a case. As a result the critical norms for evaluating argumentation are not applicable to a legal decision. In this contribution I will try to refute these two objections by showing how the ideals of a critical discussion relate to the ideals of the Rule of Law and how these ideals function as starting points in analyzing and evaluating legal decisions, focusing on reconstructing standpoints.
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Notes
- 1.
As MacCormick points out in his Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory (1978), one of the central questions in these different approaches is the search for criteria of soundness of legal argumentation. According to MacCormick, legal reasoning is an activity conducted within more or less vague or clear, implicit or explicit, normative criteria. Any study of legal interpretation and argumentation – he argues – is an attempt to explicate and explain these criteria as to what constitutes an acceptable or an unacceptable type of argument in law.
- 2.
Cf. Feteris (1999).
- 3.
Cf. Feteris (1999).
- 4.
Characteristic of the logical approach is the abstraction from the communicative and interactional context in which the legal argumentation is used. The argumentation is reconstructed as an abstract argumentative product of just one language user, usually a judge. As a consequence this approach cannot adequately describe and explain the structural complexity of argumentation in legal decisions.
- 5.
Cf. Hart (1961:142): ‘“The score is what the scorer says it is” would be false if it meant that there was no rule for scoring save what the scorer in his discretion chose to apply. There might indeed be a game with such a rule, and some amusement might be found in playing it if the scorer’s discretion were exercised with some regularity; but it would be a different game. We may call such a game the game of ‘scorer’s discretion’.’
- 6.
Already in his first publications in 1962 about Speech Acts J.L. Austin made observations about the nature of judicial decisions. He argues that if it is established that a performative utterance is performed happily and in all sincerity, that still does not suffice it beyond the reach of all criticism. It may always be criticized in a different dimension, a dimension comparable with the true/false criterium used to evaluate constative utterances: ‘Allowing that, in declaring the accused guilty, you have reached your verdict properly and in good faith, it still remains to ask whether the verdict was just, or fair’ (1974:21).
- 7.
Cf. Austin (1974:14) `[…] Our performative, like any other ritual or ceremony, may be, as the lawyers say, “nul and void”. If for example, the speaker is not in a position to perform an act of that kind, or if the object with respect to which he purports to perform is not suitable for the purpose, then he doesn’t manage simply by issuing his utterance, to carry out the purported act.'
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Kloosterhuis, H. (2013). The Rule of Law and the Ideal of a Critical Discussion. In: Dahlman, C., Feteris, E. (eds) Legal Argumentation Theory: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 102. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4670-1_5
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