Abstract
Aulis Aarnio addresses the question of how legal interpretations should be justified. Aarnio considers a justification to be rational only if the justification process has been conducted in a rational way, and if the final result of this process is acceptable to the legal community. According to Aarnio, a theory concerning the justification of legal interpretations should contain a procedural component specifying the conditions of rationality for legal discussions, and a substantial component specifying the material conditions of acceptability for the final result. The procedural component of Aarnio’s theory formulates rules for the rationality of legal discussions. The substantial component specifies when the result of a legal interpretation can be called acceptable. Aarnio considers such a result acceptable if it is acceptable to a particular legal community in which there is consensus with respect to certain norms and values.
In this chapter, I explain in more detail how these ideas are developed in Aarnio’s theory. As an introduction to Aarnio’s conceptual framework, Sect. 8.2 will deal with the concept of an interpretation standpoint, and Sect. 8.3 will show how such a standpoint is justified. The topic of Sect. 8.4 is the distinction between the rationality and acceptability of legal interpretations. The Sects. 8.5 and 8.6 examine the role of the concepts rationality and acceptability in Aarnio’s theory. Finally, Sect. 8.7 specifies those parts of Aarnio’s theory that are of particular importance for the analysis and evaluation of legal argumentation and for a further development of a theory of legal argumentation.
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- 1.
Although Aarnio’s theory is restricted to interpretations in legal dogmatics , he is of the opinion that, in principle, the interpretation of legal rules in legal practice occurs under similar circumstances. See Aarnio ( 1987 :230).
- 2.
- 3.
Cf. Peczenik ( 1989 :43) who makes a similar distinction.
- 4.
See Aarnio ( 1987 :75–76).
- 5.
See Aarnio ( 1987 :108).
- 6.
Aarnio calls the arguments supporting the alternative standpoint of B contra-arguments, because they are arguments attacking A’s standpoint.
- 7.
Cf. Alexy’s (1989) genetic argumentation scheme (J.4.1).
- 8.
Cf. the systematic argumentation scheme in Alexy’s (1989) theory and arguments from coherence in MacCormick’s theory.
- 9.
- 10.
- 11.
See Aarnio ( 1987 :120).
- 12.
See Aarnio ( 1987 :122).
- 13.
Aarnio interprets Perelman’s concept of ‘reasonable’ as ‘acceptable’ (for Perelman’s concept see Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca 1969 ). Because acceptability is related to the knowledge and values of a certain legal community, Aarnio considers the acceptability of legal interpretations as axiological acceptability. For a discussion of Perelman’s theory see Chap. 4 of this book.
- 14.
Because Alexy’s (1989) system of principles and rules is a mixture of different kinds of elements (certain rules or principles have a character of natural law, while others may have an empirical colour), Aarnio’s list is not identical to Alexy’s. Only the basic idea of D-rationality is formulated according to the model of Habermas and Alexy. For a discussion of Alexy’s theory see Chap. 7 of this book and for a discussion of Habermas’s theory see Chap. 5 of this book.
- 15.
Cf. Alexy’s rationality rules (2.1), (2.2) and (2.3).
- 16.
Cf. Alexy’s justification rules (5.1.1) and (5.1.2).
- 17.
Cf. Alexy’s rationality rule (2).
- 18.
Cf. Alexy’s rule (3.3) for allocating the burden of proof .
- 19.
Cf. Alexy’s rules (3.2) and (3.4) for the burden of proof.
- 20.
Cf. Alexy’s rule (3.1) for the burden of proof .
- 21.
See Aarnio ( 1987 :212–213).
- 22.
For a discussion of Perelman’s concept of the audience see Chap. 4 of this book.
- 23.
Cf. Alexy ( 1989 :102) in his discussion of Habermas’s consensus theory of truth who remarks that the acceptability of a standpoint is connected with the opinion of people who can enter a discussion, a condition for the truth of an utterance is the potential agreement of all people.
- 24.
Aarnio’s theory of rational acceptability does not relate to the distinction true/false. There can be more ‘true’ normative standpoints in a society on the basis of various starting points .
- 25.
In this context, Alexy refers to Popper’s ( 1970 :56) thesis of ‘the myth of the framework’, according to which it is always possible to have a discussion between people belonging to different frameworks. We are prisoners caught in the framework of our theories, our expectations, our past experiences, and our language. But we are prisoners in a Pickwickian sense: if we try, we can break out of our framework at any time. We shall always find ourselves again in a new framework, but that framework will be a better and roomier one, and we can at any moment break out of it again.
- 26.
As Wróblewski (1974) points out, there is no essential difference between the norms for the internal and internal justification . The norms for the external justification include, besides the requirement of logical validity , other material requirements.
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Feteris, E.T. (2017). Aarnio’s Theory of the Justification of Legal Interpretations. In: Fundamentals of Legal Argumentation. Argumentation Library, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1129-4_8
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