Argument Types and Fallacies in Legal Argumentation

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.

Introduction.- about the authors.- I. Argument Types or Fallacies?.- 1. Appeal to Expert Testimony – A Bayesian Approach; Christian Dahlman and  Lena Wahlberg.- 2. Ad Hominem Fallacies and Epistemic Credibility; Audrey Yap.- 3. On the Absence of Evidence; Giovanni Tuzet.- 4. The Uses of Slippery Slope Argument; Jose Juan Moreso.- 5. Institutional constraints of topical strategic maneuvering in legal argumentation. The case of ‘insulting’;  Harm Kloosterhuis.- 6. One-Sided Argumentation in the Defense of Marriage Act; Janice Schuetz.- II. Argument Types and Legal Interpretation.- 7. Anti-Theoretical Claims about Legal Interpretation: The Argument behind the Fallacy; Thomas Bustamante.- 8. Frames of Interpretations and the Container-Retrieval View: Reflections on a Theoretical Contest;  Pierluigi Chiassoni.- 9. Argument Structures in Legal Interpretation: Balancing and Thresholds; Michal Araszkiewicz.- 10. An Analysis of some Juristic Techniques for Handling Systematic Defects in the Law; Giovanni Battista Ratti.- 11. Argumentation from reasonableness in the justification of judicial decisions;  Eveline Feteris.- 12. Legal Argumentation and Theories of Adjudication in the U.S. Legal Tradition: Between Cass Sunstein’s Minimalism, Richard Posner’s Pragmatism and Ronald Dworkin’s Advocacy of Integrity; Bernardo Gonçalves Fernandes.- Index.