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Full-Text Articles in Legal History
Running Backs, Wolves, And Other Fatalities: How Manipulations Of Coherence In Legal Opinions Marginalize Violent Death, Jonathan Yovel
Running Backs, Wolves, And Other Fatalities: How Manipulations Of Coherence In Legal Opinions Marginalize Violent Death, Jonathan Yovel
Jonathan Yovel
By examining legal cases that involve violent death and its marginalization by the courts, this essay looks into the relations between narrative coherence and narrative absurd in judicial opinions. Coherence, rather than a static, unequivocal characteristic of legal narratives, is studied here as a highly manipulable narrative and rhetorical performance. Giving a performative twist to reader-response approaches I do not really ask what is the meaning of this text (as construed by its reading)? but rather, working from the position of the text's discursive community, what does this text do? The reading of these cases explores how judicial narration and …
Analogical Reasoning As Translation: The Pragmatics Of Transitivity, Jonathan Yovel
Analogical Reasoning As Translation: The Pragmatics Of Transitivity, Jonathan Yovel
Jonathan Yovel
This paper attempts to examine the underlying structure of analogical reasoning in decision making. The immediate (but not exclusive) context is the form of reasoning commonly seen as prevalent in common-law judicial decision making. Following Wittgenstein and Strawson the paper identifies the problem of the contingency of transitivity of analogical relations as a serious impediment to analogical reasoning. It then proceeds to offer a method of translation that delineates the borders of contingency and analyticity of transitivity in such cases, as well as proposes how these borders may be manipulated. The theoretical insight is to treat analogical relations anaphorically, as …