Studies In Legal Interpretation Reasoning

During the last half of the 20 th century, the research on justification of legal interpretation has grown significantly. It is attracting attention not only from academics of law, including legal philosophy, legal hermeneutics, but also from the other disciplines, such as topic-rhetoric, informal logics and argumentation theory. The interpreter should justify why the standpoint he chose is reasonable to his audience and this is the core issue of the justification of legal interpretation.Legal interpretation reasoning is a reasoning procedure which is from the set of legal norms and legal interpretations to the set of legal interpretation standpoint. The macrostructure of legal interpretation should take account of interpreter, the set of premises, reasoning rules, balancing and premise weight. And the evaluation should consider both the material problems and procedural problems. A legal interpretation reasoning is justified, when it satisfies the evaluative standards of argument, follows the procedural rules of argumentation, and finally successfully persuades the audience. But instead of an independent reasoning or argument, most theories just take legal interpretation as an inference of reasoning chains during judicial verdiction. Not to mention the work of modeling and evaluation. In that case, we try to propose a new independent logical structure of legal interpretation with evaluation system by the tools and methods from informal logic and argumentation theory.The thesis consists of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 will introduce some basic definitions and conceptions, including legal interpretation reasoning, legal argument, argumentation diagram scheme, evaluation system of general argumentation and so on. We also compare the differences between reasoning and argument. Chapter 2 will state legal interpretation in philosophical and practical aspects from hermeneutical view and discuss the hierarchy of interpretation methods. Chapter 3 will discuss the science of topic-rhetoric which has been misunderstood and ignored for a very long time. We will review the role of classical argumentation theory played in the modern research of legal interpretation. Chapter 4 will indicate the disadvantage and limitation of the present legal argumentation theories. The most legal argumentation theories usually confuse legal norms and legal interpretation as the same reasonable order and also fail to present an independent reasoning construction and evaluation system. Stated thus, in Chapter 5 we will propose a new theory of the justification of legal interpretation, that is the conductive structure of legal interpretation reasoning and corresponding evaluation system. Finally, we will apply this new theory on some classic cases.