Law & Society Blog

I couldn’t agree more with Bloomfield’s post. Arguments are only as strong as the inference warrants that connect a claim to the evidence, and most of what counts as a “good argument,” that is, a convincing use of an inference warrant, is not only culturally dependent but also varies greatly from one specialized sub-system to another. In comparative law, there is an additional, recursive twist. The persuasive value of references to the strutcure of the legal system itself (the “unity of the law” or “Einheit der Rechtsordnung“) is different from one legal culture to another. Thus, arguably, “systematic” (that is, strutural) arguments have greater currency in many civil law jurisdictions, and “historic” arguments, that is, invoking similar past decisions as precedents, have greater currency in the common law tradition.