Studies in Legal Logic is a collection of nine interrelated papers about the logic, epistemology and ontology of law. All of the papers were written after the publication of the author's Reasoning with Rules and supplement the issues addressed therein. Some of the papers are new; others have been revised substantially after the publication of their original versions. The emphasis is on analysis, not on logical technicalities.

Studies in Legal Logic contains chapters about the nature of norms, the role of coherence in the law, the nature of...

Rule-applying legal arguments are traditionally treated as a kind of syllogism. Such a treatment overlooks the fact that legal principles and rules are not statements which describe the world, but rather means by which humans impose structure on the world. Legal rules create legal consequences, they do not describe them. This has consequences for the logic of rule- and principle-applying arguments, the most important of which may be that such arguments are defeasible. This book offers an extensive analysis of the role of rules and principles in legal reasoning, which focuses on the close...