An Ubiquitous Paralogism in Legal Thinking

Abstract

It is the purpose of this paper to arrive at the thesis that the operation with legal norms all too often indulges in a kind of thinking which includes the risk of what we may call the paralogism of the neglected sequence. Many controversial, and even untenable, attitudes denote a failure of reasoning which is to be accounted for. Both the danger of the paralogism, and the paralogism itself if at all real would seem to be particularly visible in civil law by reason of its being centered on the concept “norm”, a circumstance which is accompanied by a paramount attention to concepts.The common law would seem to be affected also, but only in the measure it goes beyond the attention to precedents.