ON THE APPLICATION OF LIGIC AND ARGUMENTATION TO THE ANALYSIS OFTHE DECISION OF A LEGAL DISPUTE (A CASE STUDY OF A CASE ON THE COLLECTION OF ALIMONY)
Elena Nikolaevna Lisanyuk1, Olga Aleksandrovna Shapiro2
1Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
2RANEPA, St. Petersburg, Russia
Keywords: conditionals, formal argumentation, deontic logic, legal argumentation, classification of disputes, methodology of normative systems
Abstract
We present the result of a case-study of reasoning in a dispute using formal-logical and qualitative methods of analysis that model demonstrative and non-demonstrative argumentation. This approach allows us to overcome the limitations of descriptive and normative methods of studying judicial argumentation used in isolation and to reconstruct the essence of a judicial dispute in its fullness and integrity. We reconstruct a fragment of a court case on the recovery of mixed alimony, connected with the opposite interpretation by the plaintiff and the defendant of one of the legal facts in the case. For the initial reconstruction, we use the Toulmin model and map the argumentation of the parties on the graph; then we identify their dispute as a complex tertiary dispute and distinguish its sub-disputes and specify the properties of each of them. Finally, with the help of the methodology of normative systems we demonstrate the core difference of the parties’ opinions in interpreting the fact of the alienation of the real estate by the defendant case and show those interpretations lead to the opposite decisions. We believe that the reconstruction and analysis of judicial disputes using the set of methods proposed by us has not only a high heuristic potential, especially in less obvious cases, but also is practically significant when the judicial dispute continues at the next instance, since it allows for a more accurate assessment of the grounds and validity of the judicial decision.
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