The Transition from Rhetoric to Chaïm Perelman’s Neo-rhetoric as a Theory of Legal Argumentation

Abstract

We start our research from a historical framework that allows us to reflect on rhetoric as an art, as a technique and as a theory of argumentation. This will allow us —as the objective of our research— to contribute to resolving the legal problems present when making a legal discourse from the field of legal argumentation by legal philosophers and legal science operators (judges, soliciting lawyers, teachers), which sometimes suffer from rigor in the logical structure, other times from foundation and motivation —material issues— and many others from a pragmatic vision that allows the union of the two previous ones plus a moral objectivist character, tending to respect from the human rights. That is why the use of a methodological framework of a neo-rhetorical-dissociative nature of legal argumentation is proposed, as a tool that allows us to enter and show ourselves the need for such dissociation as a reflective change, which arises from the search to avoid incompatibility between thesis, (of a normative nature, of facts or truths) present in the social, political, economic and legal reality.