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The present treatise is a contribution to the analytical tradition in jurisprudence. It focuses on the issues of legal argumentation, i.e. on how to construct and read the law in a well-reasoned manner. The three ideologies of judicial decision-making by Jerzy Wróblewski, i.e. the bound, legal and rational, and free ideology, and the three situations of legal decision-making by Kaarle Makkonen, i.e. the isomorphic, semantically class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">ambiguous, and unregulated situation, provide for its initial frame of reference. Of Wróblewski's ideologies of judicial decision-making, the one based on legality and rationality of the decision is the most promising for further study, since it acknowledges the impact of the institutional and societal sources of law and the commonly adopted models of legal reasoning upon the legal discretion of the judge. Wróblewski's and Makkonen's analytical approach to the judge's legal discretion is then further elaborated with ten different frames of legal analysis discerned from an isomorphic theory of law and the coherence theory of law to radical, ad hoc based decisionism. A frame of legal analysis is required for determining the semantic qualities of a legal assertion, i.e. the truth-value (reference/Frege, extension/Carnap) and meaning-content (sense/Frege, intension/Carnap) of an assertion on how to construct and read the law, in line with Gottlob Frege's and Rudolf Carnap's idea of modern semantics. Carnap's method of extension and intension is adopted as the ground for further analysis.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-007-1872-2_1

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