Argumentation Schemes as an Effective Tool in Cases of Double Taxation

This project description focuses on a specific occurrence of normative conflicts. It addresses the need of deciding the applicable law when conflicting pieces of legislation coming from different legal systems have to be merged. I will check whether and how the argumentation method could help to deal with these cases of normative interactions. Actually, from the logical point of view, the situation described poses some challenging issues, first of all that of taking into consideration contextual reasoning. Furthermore, the task of merging of normative provisions from different legal systems is itself far from being just an automatic activity: merging is not obvious and when it is required in a concrete case, the point is that in principle the systematic character of law cannot allow the legal operator to mechanically combine X from system x and Y from system y. The argumentation method can show its efficacy when reasoning in such situations is often characterized by interpretive uncertainty. The methodology I will follow consists of two main steps: firstly, I outline the legal case study drawn from international taxation law, i.e. juridical double imposition; then, I propose some argument schemes that can exemplify the legal reasoning and the inference chain that lead the legal operator when facing such situations.