Matthias Armgardt – författare

This book intends to unite studies in different fields related to the development of the relations between logic, law and legal reasoning. Combining historical and philosophical studies on legal reasoning in Civil and Common Law, and on the often neglected Arabic and Talmudic traditions of jurisprudence, this project unites these areas with recent technical developments in computer science.

The publication discusses new insights in the interaction between logic and law, and more precisely the study of different answers to the question: what role does logic play in legal reasoning? Varying perspectives include that of foundational studies (such as logical principles and frameworks) to applications, and historical perspectives.

This volume explores the relation between legal reasoning and logic from both a historical and a systematic perspective. The topics addressed include, among others, conditional legal acts, disjunctions in legal acts, presumptions and conjectures, conflicts of values, Jørgensen´s Dilemma, the Rhetor´s Dilemma, the theory of legal fictions and the categorization of contracts. The unifying problematic of these contributions concerns the conditional structures and, more particularly, the relationship between legal theory and legal reasoning in the context of conditions.

The contributions in this work constitute the first results of the ANR-DFG joint research project “JuriLog” (Jurisprudence and Logic), which aims at fostering the cooperation between legal scholars and philosophers. On the one hand, lawyers and legal scholars have an interest in emphasizing the logical character of legal reasoning. In this respect, the present enquiry examines the question of how logic, especially newer forms of dialogical logic, can be made fruitful as a significant area of philosophy for jurisprudence and legal practice. On the other hand, logicians find in legal reasoning a striving towards clear definitions and inference-procedures that is relevant to their discipline. In order to fully understand such reciprocal relationships, it is necessary to bridge the gap between law, logic and philosophy in contemporary academic research. The essays collected in this volume all work towards this common goal.

The book is divided in three sections. In the first part, the strong relation between Roman Law and logic is explored with respect to the analysis of disjunctive statements in legal acts. The second part focuses on Leibniz´s legal theory. The third part, finally, is dedicated to current interactions between law and logic.