“…animated by a number of fundamental principles”: An analysis of pragmatic argumentation in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments on human rights

The aim of this paper is to combine a quantitative analysis of indicators of pragmatic argumentation with a qualitative investigation of the argument scheme in a corpus of Supreme Court of Ireland’s judgments. The quantitative analysis indicates that the Supreme Court’s argumentation tends to support judicial standpoints by focusing on the negative impact of alternative lines of argument, whether from other judgments or the parties’ submissions. Alternatively, the argumentation draws the relevant audience’s attention to legal values and principles underlying legislation or the Constitution. The qualitative study of Heneghan v. Minister for Housing, furthermore, shows how the Court’s pragmatic argumentation combined its positive and negative variant, and responded to the relevant critical questions. Overall, the use of corpus-informed tools played a central role in the study of indicators of argumentation as “‘entry points” into the construction of judicial argumentation (Goźdź-Roszkowski, 2021), which is fruitfully integrated with insights from argumentation theory.