Legal Reasoning System

In order to apply legal arguments, a judge must establish the facts of a case, the issue, the relevant legislation and any precedents (in common law jurisdictions). In an institutionalized system with many decision-makers and a heterogeneous group of legal documents, there is a tension between decision-making, which is relatively predictable for those to whom it will apply, and the moral improvement of the law. In this context, precedents and analogies help to enhance the predictability of decisions while leaving room for the courts to improve the law. They do this in two different ways. Precedents can be distinguished (and can be rejected), while analogies provide inconclusive reasons for achieving a particular result. The success of these compromises depends on the existence of some degree of agreement among policymakers on the important values that the law serves – both measures would be too weak in the face of widespread and deep disagreement over values. In law, there are a number of mechanisms that help maintain such relative consensus: legal training, work environment and selection of candidates for the bank tend to lead to more convergence than in the community at large. In addition, there is an element of internal feedback: when deciding cases, courts are aware that their decisions can be distinguished (and overturned) and that only their decision is binding on subsequent courts. This gives them good reasons to put forward justifications based on values widely supported by their brothers. Like legal realists, the method of criticism was to expose and make transparent the latent subtexts of legal doctrines and policies, hidden frameworks, empirical assumptions and social visions, conventional legal reasoning, and the scripted social roles it gave to people. But the goal was not just to expose oneself; The aim was to develop alternative doctrinal and political arguments in specific areas of law, thus paving the way for revisionist policies based on different conceptions of social reality and human potential. Legal reasoning gives what has been decided in the past a weight that is usually lacking in personal decision-making.

We care if we have made the right decisions in the past, but we try to make the right decisions now without being constrained by our previous views. Precedent and analogy are two central and complementary forms of legal argumentation. What makes them characteristic of legal reasoning are the circumstances of legal decision-making. The biggest contrast lies in individual reasoning, where neither precedents nor analogies have the same meaning. A person can give weight to what they have done in the past, for example: Because they believe the decision was made under optimal conditions, or because they should not or do not want to disappoint someone`s expectations, or because there are special reasons to treat both situations equally. Similarly, comparing the problem to another situation can help clarify one`s own thinking, but judgment on the other case is only relevant to the extent that it is correct. CLS began as a series of criticisms of these post-war methods of legal argumentation. Unlike other movements that pursued realist legal critique, such as the Law and Society movement (which empirically studied the social influences that contributed to the formation and actual social impact of legal rules), critics used internal criticism: they attacked the dominant modes of doctrinal and political reasoning practiced by law professors.

judges and other officials on their own terms. The goal is to develop counter-arguments to teach law students and practicing lawyers. Arguments drawn from precedents and analogies are characteristic of legal argumentation. Legal reasoning differs in many ways from the type of reasoning that individuals use in their daily lives. Arguments are often used that individuals do not use or that individuals use in different ways. The precedents are a good example. In individual reasoning, we generally don`t take the fact that we`ve chosen a path in the past as an assumption that we should make the same choice in the future. Of course, there may be special circumstances that have this effect – someone may have relied on what we have done before, or their expectations have been raised that we would do it again – but without these special considerations, we do not consider ourselves committed to making the same decision in the future. We are always free to reconsider a decision and change our mind when we no longer believe our original judgment was correct. It is often argued that reasoning by analogy and distinctive precedents are mirror images of each other: given the facts of two cases, the question arises as to whether there is a good reason to treat them differently (e.g., Eisenberg 1988, 87). In the case of distinction, a precedent must be followed, unless there are good reasons to treat it differently.

In the case of the analogy, it is said, a precedent must be extended, unless there are good reasons to treat the present case differently. However, this is misleading because the symmetry is incomplete. A precedent cannot be distinguished for reasons that would essentially mean that the precedent was badly decided: it must be treated as having been correctly decided. However, there is no need to prolong a precedent if subsequent courts find its reasoning unconvincing. A long-standing common law doctrine is that a husband cannot commit the crime of rape against his wife. In the twentieth century, power was increasingly recognized as archaic and offensive. Therefore, contrary to the issue of identity theft discussed above, no one has proposed extending the rule to cohabiting couples. [18] However, if a decision is not considered wrong, it provides an argument for follow-up.

However, the subsequent court may always decide that, overall, this would not be desirable. Temporal terms are found in important areas of law such as labour law (e.g. time conditions for calculating performance times), commercial law (e.g..dem the time of information used to establish the validity of agreements or to calculate damages† [Blumsohn, 1991]), criminal law (e.g., known temporal information on the different elements of the analysis of a criminal case) and patent law (e.g. in patent regulations). In addition, many codes of practice associated with these statutes typically require scheduling on a temporal representation basis. Theories of legal thought are primarily normative theories. „Argumentation” here refers to the actual discourses used to advance arguments, including arguments embodied explicitly or implicitly in those discourses, non-rational means of persuasion, and strategy, tactics, and styles of argumentation. Reasoning can be studied from a wide range of empirical, interpretive, and critical perspectives that apply to social discourse in general, including rhetoric, conversational analysis, semantics, and semiotics.

See ethnomethodology: general; logic and linguistics; Rhetoric. There is little sustained research on the actual discursive practices of legal acts and, as in the normative literature, most studies have focused on reasoning in case law and advocacy.