Going beyond legal formalism and psychologistic argumentation
(by M. Manzin)
Good news for an old question: what do we really mean by legal logic? A recent article by Francesco Cavalla points out some difficulties about many vulgar accounts on how lawyers normally use legal propositions in their discourses. A well-grounded criticicism is advanced expecially against the syllogistic theory (presuming a formalized language and an objectivity of descriptions which are far to be obtained in legal reasoning), as well as against those accounts on legal argumentation which exlude any kind of truth except for the one granted by formal or empirical sciences. Cavalla focuses on what he names “locally valid premise (protasis)”: the legal discourse’s starting point from which to infer a (locally) irrefutable conclusion, thanks to the use of the identity and non-contradiction principles.
Read more in the extended English version of Cavalla’s article (published in Italian ap. Enciclopedia Filosofica, 7, Milan:Bompiani 2006). Download the attached PDF file below.