As aptly argued by Godden (2010: 12), “some fields of argument in society come with external enforcement mechanisms which extend the effective domain of argumentation well beyond the argumentative situation itself.” Such is the case of legal argumentation and in particular judicial decision-making performed in last-instance courts, like the Court of Justice of the European Union or the Polish Constitutional Court, which may render the results of lower courts' argumentation null and void. It is against this backdrop and along the lines of legal and linguistic argumentation theories that the ensuing discussion of judicial argumentative discourse will be organised. First, the subject matter and the historical background of argumentative discourse studies will be presented; next, the notion of legal (judicial) argumentation will be delineated and, finally, legal argumentation theories accommodating historical and pragma-dialectical points of view will be outlined.

Subject-matter of argumentative discourse studies

Being a clearly multidisciplinary field of inquiry, argumentation has long attracted researchers working within different scholarly traditions; be it formal logic, legal theory, philosophy, psychology, linguistics or discourse analysis. Intended as an economical introduction to what constitutes a research area in its own right, this subchapter will, for the sake of clarity, look at the meaning of the very words “argument” and “argumentation.”