Legal Philosophy Colloquium: Sarah Lawsky
Department: Philosophy
Date and Time: December 4, 2014 | 5:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Law 3500
Event Details
STATUTORY REASONING
Sarah Lawsky
Professor of Law at UC Irvine
Graduate Student, UC Irvine (LPS)
Statutory reasoning is not best understood as merely deductive, and thus standard formal logic is not the best approach for modeling statutory reasoning. Rather, as examples from the Internal Revenue Code illustrate, at least some statutory reasoning is best characterized as defeasible reasoning—reasoning that may result in conclusions that can be defeated by subsequent information—and is best modeled using default logic.