What is Legal Argumentation?

Two new (or newish) books examine legal argumentation, the most recent being an edited work consisting of thirty-four chapters. The purpose of this article is to review both books—although much greater emphasis will be on the edited work—with the aim of discovering how useful the books might be for those researching into legal argumentation and reasoning. The article will argue that there are some basic shortcomings. The edited work focuses largely on what theorists have to say about legal argumentation—examples from the case law are limited (with one or two exceptions)—and so researchers will learn on the whole what legal argumentation ought to be rather than what it actually is. A second reservation, applying to both books, is that there is little or no interest in examining what legal argumentation and reasoning has been. This, arguably, is to be regretted because the past can tell us much about the present. Keywords: analogy; argumentation; artificial intelligence; epistemology; logic; reasoning; rule-model; syllogism.