Law and Logic: E. Bulygin’s Deductive Pattern of Judicial Reasoning

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the debate over the possibilities and limits of logic in law became particularly acute with the emergence of judicial realism, a philosophical and legal trend that denied the deductive nature of judicial decision-making. This compromised the theory of the judicial syllogism, assuming that a judicial decision could be deduced as a logical consequence from the premises - norms and facts, and generally provoked a sceptical attitude towards logic in law. The subject of the article is the deductive model of the justification of judicial decisions proposed by the outstanding legal philosopher Eugenio Bulygin. The aim of the article is to show Bulygin’s contribution to the improvement of the deductive model of judicial reasoning. The main innovations Bulygin brought to the deductive model of judicial reasoning are: 1) justifying, based on logical analysis and open texture of language theory, the analytical character of the court interpretative sentences; 2) distinguishing the individual and the generic subsumptions, etc. At the same time, the authors conclude that Bulygin’s improved deductive theory is not free from criticism, as the Argentine jurist does not succeed in complete eliminating doubts about the logical deducibility of at least some categories of decisions from general rules.