Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument: A Study of Defeasible Reasoning in Law: 32 (Law and Philosophy Library, 32) - Hardcover

Prakken, H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0792347765 ISBN 13: 9780792347767

Publisher: Springer, 1997

Synopsis

This book is a revised and extended version of my PhD Thesis 'Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument', which I defended on 14 January 1993 at the Free University Amsterdam. The first five chapters of the thesis have remained almost completely unchanged but the other chapters have undergone considerable revision and expansion. Most importantly, I have replaced the formal argument-based system of the old Chapters 6, 7 and 8 with a revised and extended system, whieh I have developed during the last three years in collaboration with Giovanni Sartor. Apart from some technical improvements, the main additions to the old system are the enriehment of its language with a nonprovability operator, and the ability to formalise reasoning about preference criteria. Moreover, the new system has a very intuitive dialectieal form, as opposed to the rather unintuitive fixed-point appearance of the old system. Another important revision is the split of the old Chapter 9 into two new chapters. The oldSection 9. 1 on related research has been updated and expanded into a whole chapter, while the rest of the old chapter is now in revised form in Chapter 10. This chapter also contains two new contributions, a detailed discussion of Gordon's Pleadings Game, and a general description of a multi-Iayered overall view on the structure of argu­ mentation, comprising a logieal, dialectical, procedural and strategie layer. Finally, in the revised conclusion I have paid more attention to the relevance of my investigations for legal philosophy and argumentation theory.

About this title

Review

`The main contribution of Prakken's work is its organization and expression of non-technical ideas. Prakken successfully makes the best possible case for logic as a tool for modeling legal reasoning. He has written the best, most technically detailed, and fairest survey of the formal work on argument and defeasible reasoning.'
Ronald P. Loui, Artificial Intelligence and Law, 3 (1995)
`... Prakken has written the best current text with which the interested logician can quickly study the main surviving applicable ideas of non-monotonic reasoning and can glimpse the themes that are shaping current research in defeasible reasoning.'
The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 64:4 (1999)

Synopsis

This book, the expanded and completely revised text of the author's 1993 dissertation, studies the logical aspects of legal reasoning, in order to provide philosophical foundations for legal applications of artificial intelligence. It respects that legal reasoning often takes place in a disputational setting, and observes that the law leaves ample room for disagreement, which means that lawyers reason under the possibility of exceptions and with contradictory legal sources, and cannot do without non-deductive reasoning forms, such as analogical reasoning. The study shows that, contrary to what is often said, these features do not escape a logical analysis if recent developments in logic and artificial intelligence on non-monotonic reasoning and defeasible argumentation are used, and if logic is regarded as a tool in, rather than as a model of, legal argument. This book should be relevant for scholars in legal philosophy, artificial intelligence, logic and argumentation theory, and can also serve as a textbook for graduate courses in Artifical Intelligence and Law, non-monotonic reasoning and legal argumentation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0792347765
• ISBN 13: 9780792347767
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 327