Abstract
This chapter provides an analysis of defeasible legal reasoning as argumentation. It first provides a general account of the idea of defeasibility and introduces the idea of nonmonotonic reasoning. It then focuses on defeasible argumentation, considering how defeasible arguments can be constructed and how they can be defeated by rebutting and undercutting counterarguments. The dialectical interactions of defeasible arguments are further explored by focusing on reinstatement and reasoning about priorities. The idea of legal systems as the basis for argumentation frameworks is then investigated. The rationale for defeasibility in law is discussed, along with the possibility of using different approaches, such as revision or probability, to deal with uncertainty in legal reasoning. Finally, an account is provided of the emergence of theories of defeasibility in philosophy, logic, and legal theory.
Keywords
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alchourrón, C.E. 1996a. Detachment and defeasibility in deontic logic. Studia Logica 57: 5–18.
Alchourrón, C.E. 1996b. On law and logic. Ratio Juris 9: 331–348.
Alchourrón, C.E., and E. Bulygin. 1971. Normative systems. Dordrecht: Springer.
Alchourrón, C.E., and D. Makinson. 1981. Hierarchies of regulations and their logic. In New studies on deontic logic, ed. R. Hilpinen, 123–148. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Alchourrón, C.E., P. Gärdenfors, and D. Makinson. 1985. On the logic of theory change: Partial meet contraction and revision functions. Journal of Symbolic Logic 50: 510–530.
Alexy, R. 2002. A theory of constitutional rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aquinas, T. 1947. Summa Theologiae. Ed. and trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Allen, TX: Benzinger Bros.
Aristotle. 1954. Nicomachean ethics. Ed. and trans. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baroni, P., M. Caminada, and M. Giacomin. 2011. An introduction to argumentation semantics. The Knowledge Engineering Review 26: 365–410.
Bench-Capon, T.J.M., and H. Prakken. 2006. Justifying Actions by Accruing Arguments. In Computational models of argument. Proceedings of COMMA 2006, ed. P.E. Dunne, and T.J.M. Bench-Capon, 247–258. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Bench-Capon, T.J.M. 2003. Persuasion in practical argument using value-based argumentation frameworks. Journal of Logic and Computation 13: 429–448.
Bench-Capon, T.J.M., and G. Sartor. 2003. A model of legal reasoning with cases incorporating theories and values. Artificial Intelligence 150: 97–142.
Blair, J.A. 2012. Groundwork in the theory of argumentation. Dordrecht: Springer.
Brewka, G. 1991. Nonmonotonic reasoning: Logical foundations of commonsense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brewer, S. 1996. Exemplary reasoning: Semantics, pragmatics and the rational force of legal argument by analogy. Harvard Law Review 109: 923–1028.
Brewer, S. 2011. Logocratic method and the analysis of arguments in evidence. Law, Probability and Risk 10: 175–202.
Brożek, B. 2004. Defeasibility of legal reasoning. Krakóv: Zakamycze.
Brożek, B. 2008. Revisability vs. Defeasibility. Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly 59: 139–147.
Brożek, B. 2014. Law and defeasibility: A few comments on the logic of legal requirements. Revus 23: 165–170.
Celano, B. 2012. True exceptions: Defeasibility and particularism. In The logic of legal requirements, ed. J. Ferrer Beltran, and G.B. Ratti, 268–287. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chisholm, R.M. 1957. Perceiving: A philosophical study. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Cicero. 1965. De inventione (Rhetorici libri duo qui vocantur de inventione). Stutgardiae: In aedibus Teubneri.
Clark, K.L. 1978. Negation as failure. In Logic and data bases, ed. H. Gallaire, and J. Minker, 293–332. New York: Plenum.
Dancy, J. 2004. Ethics without principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dascal, M., and J. Wróblewski. 1988. Transparency and Doubt: Understanding and interpretation in pragmatics and in law. Law and Philosophy 7: 203–224.
Duarte, D. 2011. Linguistic objectivity in norm sentences: Alternatives in literal meaning. Ratio Juris 24: 112–139.
Duarte de Almeida, L. 2013. A proof-based account of legal exceptions. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 1: 133–168.
Dung, P.M. 1995. On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming, and n–person games. Artificial Intelligence 77: 321–357.
Fenton, N., M. Neil, and D. Berger. 2016. Bayes and the law. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application 3: 51–77.
Ferrer Beltran, J., and G.B. Ratti (eds.). 2012a. The logic of legal requirements: Essays on defeasibility. Oxford University Press.
Ferrer Beltran, J., and G.B. Ratti (eds.). 2012b. Defeasibility and legality: A survey. In The logic of legal requirements: Essays on defeasibility, eds. J. Ferrer Beltran, and G.B. Ratti, 11–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gazzo Castañeda, L.E., and M. Knauff. 2016. Defeasible reasoning with legal conditionals. Memory and Cognition 44: 499–517.
Gärdenfors, P. 1987. Knowledge in flux. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ginzberg, M.L. (ed.). 1987. Readings in nonmonotonic reasoning. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Gordon, T.F. 1988. The importance of nonmonotonicity for legal reasoning. In Expert systems in law: Impacts on legal theory and computer law, ed. H. Fiedler, F. Haft, and R. Traunmüller, 111–126. Tübingen: Attempto.
Gordon, T.F. 1995. The pleadings game. An artificial intelligence model of procedural justice. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Gordon, T.F., H. Prakken, and D.N. Walton. 2007. The Carneades model of argument and burden of proof. Artificial Intelligence 171: 875–896.
Governatori, G., M.J. Maher, D. Billington, and G. Antoniou. 2004. Argumentation semantics for defeasible logics. Journal of Logic and Computation 14: 675–702.
Governatori, G., A. Rotolo, and G. Sartor. 2005. Temporalised normative positions in defeasible logic. In Proceedings of the tenth international conference on artificial intelligence and law (ICAIL 2005), 25–34. New York: ACM.
Governatori, G., and A. Rotolo. 2010. Changing legal systems: Legal abrogations and annulments in defeasible logic. Logic Journal of IGPL 18: 157–194.
Guastini, R. 2012. Defeasibility, axiological gaps, and interpretation. In The logic of legal requirements, ed. J. Ferrer Beltran, and G.B. Ratti, 182–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hage, J.C. 1997. Reasoning with rules: An essay on legal reasoning and its underlying logic. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hage, J.C. 2005. Studies in legal logics. Dordrecht: Springer.
Hage, J.C., and A. Peczenik. 2000. Law, morals and defeasibility. Ratio Juris 13: 305–325.
Hart, H.L.A. 1951. The ascription of responsibility and rights. In Logic and language, ed. A. Flew, 145–166. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Hitchcock, D. 2017. On reasoning and argument: Essays in informal logic and on critical thinking. Dordrecht: Springer.
Holland, J. 2012. Signals and boundaries building blocks for complex adaptive systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Holland, J., K.J. Holyoak, R.E. Nisbett, and P.R. Thagard. 1989. Induction. Processes of inference, learning and discovery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Holyoak, K., and P. Thagard. 1996. Mental leaps: Analogy in creative thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horty, J. 2001. Nonmonotonic logic. In The Blackwell guide to philosophical logic, ed. L. Goble, 336–361. Oxford: Blackwell.
Horty, J.F. 2007. Defaults with priorities. Journal of Philosophical Logic 36: 367–413.
Horty, J.F. 2011. Rules and reasons in the theory of precedent. Legal Theory 10: 1–33.
Horty, J.F. 2012. Reasons as defaults. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hunter, A. 2013. A probabilistic approach to modelling uncertain logical arguments. International Journal of Approximate Reasoning 54: 47–81.
Kant, I. 1949. On a suppposed right to lie from altruistic motives. In Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, ed. L., White Beck, 346–350. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Koons, R. 2017. Defeasible reasoning. In The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. E.N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reasoning-defeasible/.
Kraus, S., D. Lehmann, and M. Magidor 1990. Nonmonotonic reasoning, preferential models and cumulative logics. Artificial Intelligence 44: 167–207.
Leibniz, G.W. 1923. De legum interpretatione, rationibus, applicatione, systemate. In Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. Edited by the Academy of Sciences of Berlin. Series VI, vol. iv. Darmstadt, Leipzig, Berlin.
Loui, R.P., and J. Norman. 1995. Rationales and argument moves. Artificial Intelligence and Law 3: 159–189.
MacCormick, D.N. 1995. Defeasibility in law and logic. In Informatics and the foundations of legal reasoning, ed. Z. Bankowski, I. White, and U. Hahn, 99–117. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Maranhao, J.S.A. 2013. Defeasibility, contributory conditionals, and refinement of legal systems. In The logic of legal requirements, ed. J. Ferrer Beltran, and G.B. Ratti, 53–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCarthy, J. 1980. Circumscription: A form of non-monotonic reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 13: 27–39.
Modgil, S., and H. Prakken. 2010. Reasoning about preferences in structured extended argumentation frameworks. In Computational models of argument. Proceedings of COMMA 2010, ed. P. Baroni, F. Cerutti, M. Giacomin, and G. Simari, 347–358. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Nute, D. 1994. Defeasible logic. In Handbook of logic in artificial intelligence and logic programming. Vol. 3: Nonmonotonic reasoning and uncertain reasoning, ed. D.M. Gabbay, C.J. Hogger, and J.A. Robinson, 353–395. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Peczenik, A. 2005. Scientia Juris: Legal doctrine as knowledge of law and as a source of law. Dordrecht: Springer.
Perelman, C., and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca. 1969. The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Pollock, J.L. 1995. Cognitive carpentry: A blueprint for how to build a person. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pollock, J.L. 1998. Perceiving and reasoning about a changing world. Computational Intelligence 14: 498–562.
Pollock, J. L. 2008. Defeasible reasoning. In J Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations, ed. E. Adler and L. J. Rips, 451–470. Cambridge University Press.
Pollock, J.L. 2010. Defeasible reasoning and degrees of justification. Argument and Computation 1: 7–22.
Popper, K.R. 1959. The logic of scientific discovery. London: Hutchinson.
Prakken, H. 1997. Logical tools for modelling legal argument: A study of defeasible reasoning in law. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Prakken, H. 2005. A study of accrual of arguments, with applications to evidential reasoning. In Proceedings of the tenth international conference on artificial intelligence and law (ICAIL 2005), 85–94. New York: ACM.
Prakken, H. 2010. An abstract framework for argumentation with structured arguments. Argument and Computation 1: 93–124.
Prakken, H., and G. Sartor. 1996. Rules about rules: Assessing conflicting arguments in legal reasoning. Artificial Intelligence and Law 4: 331–368.
Prakken, H., and G. Sartor. 1998. Modelling reasoning with precedents in a formal dialogue game. Artificial Intelligence and Law 6: 231–287.
Prakken, H., and G. Sartor. 2009. A logical analysis of burdens of proof. In Legal evidence and proof: Statistics, stories, logic, ed. H. Kaptein, H. Prakken, and B. Verheij, 223–253. Farnham: Ashgate.
Prakken, H., and G. Sartor. 2015. Law and logic: A review from an argumentation perspective. Artificial Intelligence 227: 214–245.
Prakken, H., and G.A.W. Vreeswijk. 2001. Logical systems for defeasible argumentation. In Handbook of philosophical logic, ed. D. Gabbay, and F. Günthner, 218–319. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Rahwan, I., and G.R. Simari. 2009. Argumentation in artificial intelligence. Dordrecht: Springer.
Raz, J. 1985. Authority, law, and morality. The Monist 68: 295–323.
Rescher, N. 1977. Dialectics: A controversy-oriented approach to the theory of knowledge. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Rescher, N. 2006. Presumption and the practices of tentative cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reiter, R. 1980. Logic for default reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 13: 81–132.
Riveret, R., H. Prakken, A. Rotolo, and G. Sartor. 2008. Heuristics in argumentation: A game-theoretical investigation. In Computational Models of Argument. Proceedings of COMMA-08, 324–335. Amsterdam: IOS Press.
Riveret, R., A. Rotolo, and G. Sartor. 2012. Probabilistic rule-based argumentation for norm-governed learning agents. Artificial intelligence and Law 20: 383–420.
Rodriguez, J. 2012. Against defeasibility of legal rules. In The logic of legal requirements, ed. J. Ferrer Beltran, and G.B. Ratti, 89–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, W.D. 1930. The right and the good. Oxford: Clarendon.
Ross, W.D. 1939. Foundations of ethics. Oxford: Clarendon.
Russell, S.J., and P. Norvig 2010. Artificial intelligence. A Modern approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Sartor, G. 1993. Defeasibility in legal reasoning. Rechtstheorie 24:281–316.
Sartor, G. 1994. A formal model of legal argumentation. Ratio Juris 7: 212–226.
Sartor, G. 2005. Legal reasoning: A cognitive approach to the law. Springer.
Sartor, G. 2013. The logic of proportionality: Reasoning with non-numerical magnitudes. German Law Journal 14: 1419–1457.
Sergot, M.J., F. Sadri, R.A. Kowalski, F. Kriwaczek, P. Hammond, and H. Cory. 1986. The British Nationality Act as a logic program. Communications of the ACM 29: 370–386.
Schauer, F.F. 2012. Is defeasibility an essential property of law? In The logic of legal requirements, ed. J. Ferrer Beltran, and G.B. Ratti, 77–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stone Sweet, A. 2004. The judicial construction of Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Toulmin, S. 1958. The uses of argument. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Verheij, B., F. Bex, S. Timmer, C. Vlek, J.-J. Meyer, S. Renooij, and H. Prakken. 2016. Arguments, scenarios and probabilities: Connections between three normative frameworks for evidential reasoning. Law, Probability and Risk 15: 35–70.
Viehweg, T. 1965. Topik und Jurisprudenz. Ein Beitrag zur rechtswissenschaflichen Grundlagenforschung. Munich: Beck.
Walton, D.N. 1996. Argumentation Schemes for Presumptive Reasoning. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Walton, D.N. 2006. Fundamentals of critical argumentation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walton, D.N. 2008. Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach. Cambridge University Press.
Walton, D.N. 2013. Methods of argumentation. Cambridge University Press.
Walton, D.N., C. Reed, and F. Macagno. 2008. Argumentation schemes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Walton, D., and G. Sartor. 2013. Teleological justification of argumentation schemes. Argumentation 2: 111–142.
Walton, D., G. Sartor, and F. Macagno. 2016. An argumentation framework for contested cases of statutory interpretation. Artificial Intelligence and Law 24: 51–91.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Nature B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sartor, G. (2018). Defeasibility in Law. In: Bongiovanni, G., Postema, G., Rotolo, A., Sartor, G., Valentini, C., Walton, D. (eds) Handbook of Legal Reasoning and Argumentation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9452-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9452-0_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-9451-3
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-9452-0
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)