The logic of judgments
COURTS have some - t ime s used the traditional syllogism to resolve what at first may seem like knotty problems. When the Supreme Court was asked whether Fernando Poe Jr. (FPJ) was a naturalborn citizen (and therefore eligible to run as president), Justice Jose Vitug, for the whole court reasoned through a straightforward uncomplicated syllogism:
Whoever is born of a Filipino father is a natural-born Filipino citizen. FPJ was born of a Filipino father. Therefore, FPJ is a natural-born Filipino citizen.
Attempts by those who attempted to introduce a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children did not succeed. The major premise, Justice Vitug correctly observed, did not distinguish. Neither would the court.
But often the reasoning is not as straightforward. It is Stephen Toulmin ( TheUsesofReason) who has had a large influence on me in legal logic, as well as Richard Posner ( The ProblemsofJurisprudence).
The elements, according to Toulmin, are the following:
A clear claim. The plaintiff is entitled to a refund of the amount paid.
Grounds. These are the facts that support the claim.
Marissa paid the amount of P1.2 million to a hotel for the use of hotel space and catering services on the day of her wedding.
Three days before the scheduled date of the wedding, a lockdown was declared by government, owing to the coronavirus pandemic.
The plaintiff never had the chance to use the hotel’s facilities nor to avail herself of its catering services.
The hotel refuses a refund, claiming that it is hotel policy that there are no refunds owing to cancellations.
Warrant. The legal premise that “warrants” the conclusion — it can be provision of law, or treaty, or ordinance, or administrative regulation.
The Civil Code prevents unjust enrichment and directs that a person unjustly enriched return that to which he is not entitled.
Backing. This is support for the warrant in the form of canons of statutory construction that allow for the use of the warrant in the way that it is used, or precedent, supporting application of the warrant in such a case.
When a judicial decision meets these four requirements clearly, it can be said to be well-reasoned.
Posner speaks of practical reasoning. And for him, this is a grab bag of arguments by which courts usually proceed: analogy, expectations of similarity, intuition, etc. That it was impossible to hold a wedding during a lockdown is not only a matter of citing the
relevant Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Disease protocols or even presidential executive orders. It can also be proved by what people observed. If even malls were closed and churches were disallowed from accepting congregations, how much less would a wedding have been allowed ( if this is not taken as a matter of judicial notice)? Practical reasoning draws from
experience. A pattern of lying and prevarication in the past, when hurled against testimony now given, may seem like an ad hominem, but from the vantage point of practical reasoning, it gives rise to suspicion in the very least of the veracity of the testimony. Thus, the techniques for impeaching a witness.
Clearly, what is fallacious in formal logic remains fallacious in legal reasoning:
Lawyers are persons who know the law.
Fr. Rannie Aquino is not a lawyer. Therefore, Fr. Rannie Aquino is not a person who knows the law. In traditional logic, this was called an illicit major and that it is fallacious is made clear by the following more familiar example:
All monkeys have two eyes. The lawyer is not a monkey. Therefore, the lawyer does not have two eyes.
But the practical reasoning that goes into judicial decisions ( and judicial proceedings) is what underlies many of the rules of evidence. The prohibition of hearsay evidence, for example (now muddled it seems by the new revisions), is based on the common experience that a message passed from one mouth to another often gets distorted, and not only by halitosis but more often by human forgetfulness or the willful decision to lie.
No, there is nothing easy about legal logic at all, and precisely because it does not lend itself to the straightforward proof of validity that you have in symbolic logic makes it the more difficult to study, to criticize and to master.