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Westerman on Goal Legislation & Legal Argumentation

By Lawrence Solum

Pauline C. Westerman (Faculty of Law, University of Groningen) has posted Arguing About Goals: The Diminishing Scope of Legal Reasoning on SSRN. Here is the 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.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on May 19, 2010 (boomark / email).