Philosophy of Legal Reasoning

Abstract

Practical legal reasoning and argumentation, as is all behavior, are subject to resource limitations. Decisions and judgments are usually made under time pressure, for example. Of particular interest here, however, are limitations on information and knowledge about the law, about the facts of a case, and more generally on our ability to experience, understand and reason rationally about the world. The theory and computational model of legal reasoning to be developed in this book attempts to take some of these pragmatic limitations on rationality into consideration. This chapter and the next discuss certain theories and models of legal philosophy and Artificial Intelligence, respectively, to see what they can contribute to our understanding of legal reasoning in the face of such limitations. After a critical examination of this previous work, my own theory of legal argumentation will then try to take into account the lessons learned.