Logic for Lawyers

Conflicts of rules occur when it is possible that two or more rules attach incompatible legal consequences to a case. Such conflicts can be conflicts of imposition, where two rules impose incompatible facts upon the world, or they can be conflicts of compliance, where two rules demand incompatible behavior from one and the same agent. These conflicts can occur between rules of the same system, but equally between rules of different (legal) systems. International law is not excluded from this development, and is in fact in many ways particularly prone to such rule conflicts. To deal with these conflicts, it is often necessary to make exceptions to one or more of the rules that are involved in the conflicts. One major purpose of this contribution is to investigate which techniques logic has on offer to deal with conflicts between rules and the exceptions that are needed in that connection. A second major purpose of the present contribution is to see what logic can offer us as techniques to avoid rule conflicts. If only one of two conflicting rules is applicable to a case, there is no conflict. Although logic can provide us with techniques to avoid and to handle conflicts of rules, it cannot make the decisions for us. The knowledge which techniques are available only gives us an indication of what is possible. Next to that we need a view on what is desirable, and this view requires the study of law, politics, international relations and morality.