Arguing About Goals: The Diminishing Scope of Legal Reasoning
16 Pages Posted: 17 May 2010
Date Written: November 1, 2008
Abstract
This article investigates the implications of goal-legislation for legal argumentation. In goal-regulation the legislator formulates the aims to be reached, leaving it to the norm-addressee to draft the necessary rules. On the basis of six types of hard cases, it is argued that in such a system there is hardly room for constructing a ratio legis. Legal interpretation is largely reduced to concretisation. This implies that legal argumentation tends to become highly dependent on expert (non-legal) knowledge.
Keywords: Expert-knowledge, framework directives, hard cases, legal argumentation, legislation, ratio legis, regulation.
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