Analogical Reasoning in Statutory Law

Analogical reasoning plays a vital role not only in the domain of precedential law - which may be regarded as a natural home for analogical inference - but also in the province of statutory law. As the author diligently shows, analogy is employed here above all in order to eliminate different sorts of legal gaps: extra legem, intra legem, contra legem, technical, logical and constructional. The so-called "ejusdem generis canon of construction", "pertinent application of statutory law", an a fortiori and comparative arguments prove also to be - to some extent - based on it. Moreover, analogy can even be considered in terms of the very method of applying statutory provisions to concrete cases, a remedy for obsolete statutory regulations or an interpretative instrument by means of which equivocal wordings of statutes can be clarified. In effect, analogical arguments appear to be remarkably pervasive in statutory law, although their scope of application often remains hidden. They can operate either under the veil of the complex conceptual and terminological apparatus typical of civil law countries' legal methodology or as a psychological fact not fully recognized in official theory.