Truls Ljungström’s Reviews > Legal Reason: The Use of Analogy in Legal Argument > Status Update

Learning the law means more than memorizing the rules that have been set down in past cases, even a very large number of them; it means understanding how the rules would be applied to other cases with different facts.

Analogi som grund för rimlig förväntan.

(3,1) If anything that has characteristics p,q, and r has characteristic s, then everything that has characteristics p,q, and r has characteristic s.

Brewer:
The logical form of an analogy is thus:
(1) A(thesource) has characteristics p,q, and r; (2) B(the target) has characteristics p,q, and r; (3) A has also characteristic s;
(4) Therefore, B has characteristic s.

Brewer calls this abduced rule an “analogy-warranting rule” or AWR.

The prominence of analogical arguments in legal reasoning is not accidental. It is in the nature of law to be a matter of rules, the principled application of which to concrete cases is accomplished by analogical reasoning.

There is something distinctive about legal reasoning, which is its reliance on analogy. Leaving more precise definition for later, ananalogical argument can be described as reasoning by example: finding the solution to a problem by reference to another similar problem and its solution.