The nature of legal reasoning: a brief reply to Dr Wilson

Abstract

Both Dr Wilson and Dr Patricia White in another review have made sound and telling criticisms of my efforts in Chapter 2 of Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory at translating legal argument into the technical forms of logic. At the time of writing the book, I was apprehensive about the likely resistance at least of lawyers and law-students to any excessive resort to technicalities of symbolism; it therefore seemed wise to simplify matters by ignoring differenees between propositional logic and the logic of predicates and of relations, thc latter being at least ostensibly the more complex and difficult, albeit more rigorously fitted to the subject matter. I hoped that my perhaps unduly cryptic footnote 5 on page 28 (noted by Dr Wilson at her footnote 29) was a sufficient acknowledgment of the technical difficulties which I was thus sweeping under the carpet. Like Dr White, but unlike Dr Wilson, I took the view that my main point about the deductive character of the arguments I had in view was unaffected by the technical infelicity from a logician's point of view of my resort to the symbolic forms of propositional logic.