A Mathematical Framework for Modeling Legal Reasoning through Conditional Logic

Legal Reasoning has challenged both logicians and philosophers in the task of representing legal knowledge and modeling the decision-making process in the Law. Despite state-of-the-art of current theories, some questions still arise, as to whether legal reasoning can actually be captured in all its characteristics by a logical formalism that is both complete and sound, and whether legal reasoning is computable. Towards solving these questions, the author presents a logical translation of legal argumentation based on ranking function semantics and also introduces a mathematical environment to allow for its implementation. This book is an interdisciplinary study in Civil Procedural Law, Constitutional Law, and Artificial Intelligence, and is a revised version of the author's original thesis. The author serves as a Justice of the Espirito Santo State Supreme Court and is a Law Professor. He holds SJD and LLM degrees from the University of São Paulo and Master's Degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Espírito Santo.