Coherence in Legal Justification

Abstract

Coherence in reasoning is one important test of its soundness as reasoning. It is a test which is not fully satisfied by mere consistency, in the sense of an absence of self-contradiction. What I say may be free of any internal inconsistency and yet fail to ‘hang together’ or to ‘make sense’ as a whole. The task of this paper is to elucidate this elusive notion of ‘coherence’, of ‘hanging together’, of ‘making sense’. In the specific context of legal justification we find that it has two applications: to reasoning on matters of law, where what is in issue is ‘normative coherence’, and to drawing inferences of fact from evidentiary facts, where what is in issue is ‘narrative coherence’. I shall consider these two applications in that order.