"The analogy...is imperfect": On criticisms of argumentation by comparison in Supreme Court of Ireland's judgments on human rights

In argumentation studies, the justification of judicial decisions has been thoroughly investigated from the disciplinary angle of pragma-dialectics. A promising development initiated by pragma-dialecticians is the so-called “indicator project” (Van Eemeren et al. 2007). The idea of looking for linguistic indicators of argumentation has been recently taken up in a number of corpus and discourse studies (Goźdź Roszkowski 2020; Mazzi 2022). This paper combines some of the above research strands to focus on criticism of argumentation by comparison in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ireland’s recent judgments on human rights. From a methodological perspective, a quantitative analysis was performed to isolate the main collocational and phraseological patterns of selected lemmas in places where the Court’s discourse appeared instrumental in highlighting or evaluating comparisons. Subsequently, a qualitative analysis was performed of two random judgments in which such patterns were detected in contexts where the Court appeared critical of argumentation by comparison, for the purpose of reconstructing the reasoning through which Justices severed the alleged analogical link. The study is meant to provide a framework for the full integration of corpus-analytic insights and argumentation analysis, where a computer-assisted approach is adopted to mine often lengthy judicial texts and guide one through core aspects of judges’ argumentation, which can then be reconstructed with the help of qualitative pragma-dialectic methods.