Christian Dahlman – författare

This book provides theoretical tools for evaluating the soundness of arguments in the context of legal argumentation. It deals with a number of general argument types and their particular use in legal argumentation. It provides detailed analyses of argument from authority, argument ad hominem, argument from ignorance, slippery slope argument and other general argument types. Each of these argument types can be used to construct arguments that are sound as well as arguments that are unsound. To evaluate an argument correctly one must be able to distinguish the sound instances of a certain argument type from its unsound instances. This book promotes the development of theoretical tools for this task.

This book offers its readers an overview of recent developments in the theory of legal argumentation written by representatives from various disciplines, including argumentation theory, philosophy of law, logic and artificial intelligence. It presents an overview of contributions representative of different academic and legal cultures, and different continents and countries. The book contains contributions on strategic maneuvering, argumentum ad absurdum, argumentum ad hominem, consequentialist argumentation, weighing and balancing, the relation between legal argumentation and truth, the distinction between the context of discovery and context of justification, and the role of constitutive and regulative rules in legal argumentation. It is based on a selection of papers that were presented in the special workshop on Legal Argumentation organized at the 25th IVR World Congress for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy held 15-20 August 2011 in Frankfurt, Germany.