Legal Logic: Concepts and Applications

• Legal logic aids in expressing rational thought, with Aristotelian logic conceptualized as a science

Utility of Logic

• Logic benefits scientific, technological, abstract, and thought-based disciplines in communication, decision-making, and human understanding.

Object of Study of Logic

• Legal thoughts that facilitate reasoned decisions, focusing on the jurist's intellectual operations and their mental products like concepts, definitions, judgments, and legal reasoning are subject of Logic.

Generalities of Logic

• Explaining reasons
• Determining the validity of events
• Executing law rationally
• Discussing and solving problems
• Understanding the relationship between state and law

Application of Logic

• Logic is applied to elucidate the truth of an event and the cause of a crime.

Conception of Logic

• Logic is viewed as a philosophical discipline.

Origin of Logic

• Logic originates from the Greek word "Lobos," expressing thought based on science.

Relevancy of Logic

• Logic is important in the daily life of legal professionals like lawyers, judges, and prosecutors.

Dimensions of Legal Logic

• Syntactics
• Semantics
• Pragmatics

Hans Kelsen on Logic and Law

• Hans Kelsen stated the connection between logic and law was used, legitimately or illegitimately in creating jurisprudence.

Reasoning

• Reasoning is a natural human activity that uses logic.

Relevancy of Logic in Law

• Logic is important in law as law should be logical, jurists, lawyers, and judges use logic when applying contradictory norms, or when one deontology or logic of norms is absorbed into another.

Limits of Logic in Law

• Logic addresses the context of justification from a formal perspective, using the principle of deducibility as a standard for correction.

Key Aspects When Creating a Sentence

• Professional Activity: Legal experts inform on a legal norm's scope, referencing prior cases to understand interpretations.
• A judge's role is to apply the law to specific cases with explanations which ensures decisions are not arbitrary.
• Jurists may apply or intervene law to concrete cases
• A judge's role is to apply laws, supported by explanations to ensure decisions are rule-based.

Legal Logic Defined

• Legal logic is a legal instrument used to find formal intellectual operations of the jurist, along with resulting products like concepts, definitions, legal relations, and judgments.

Types of Logic

• Jurists: study the reasoning of legal professionals, analyzing normative propositions.
• Logic of Law: Is a material logic with principal rules in formal logic as a research method using reason and symbolic language for legal knowledge, enables precise results and reasoning for decisions.

Universal Principles of Logic for Legal Logic

• Principle of Identity
• Principle of Identity of the Imperative
• Principle of Identity of Legal Logic
• Principle of Non-Contradiction
• Principle of Imperative Contradiction
• Principle of Contradiction of Legal Logic
• Principle of Third Excluded
• Principle of Third Excluded of the Imperative
• Principle of the Third Excluded from Legal Logic

Principle of Identity

• A concept, idea, or object is always identical to its characteristic or nature with objective truth and validity from object's ontological structure

Principle of Identity of the Imperative

• Every mandate is exactly identical to what is done, meaning obedience to what is established which signifies required compliance, like complying with the hierarchy of norms.

Principle of Identity of Legal Logic

• The norm permits that which is not legally prohibited, it is a valid norm because everything indicated in the law must be respected by all citizens and authorities that create it.

Principle of Non-Contradiction

• Two claims, where one affirms what the other denies, cannot simultaneously be true, meaning that one is false if the judgments do not match.

Principle of Imperative Contradiction

• A command is contradictory if it orders and does not order a certain action avoiding obedience and validity.

Principle of Contradiction of Legal Logic

• Two contradictory rules regulate similar material, spatial, and temporal aspects, one permitting an action and the other prohibiting it for similar subjects

Principle of the Excluded Third

• Definitions complement each other because the first indicates what the second implies, on this basis, only one of the judgments is true.

Principle of the Third Excluded of the Imperative

• Two contradictory rules cannot be invalid or inapplicable simultaneously and must have its application observed.