Legal Argumentation and Evidence by Douglas Walton (review)

112 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 flooded into Montreal and the conditions they found: smallpox, slums, bad milk, and >black holes= in factory basements for child cigarmakers who acted childish. A much reprinted chapter, >The Prussians Are Next Door,= explains how federal mishandling of Great War recruitment combined with Ontario=s suppression of French schools to channel French-Canadian militancy towards fellow Canadians rather than faraway Germans. A creative chapter on postwar culture conveys the dramatic impact of television in 1950s Quebec. If it opened up a world of consumerism, it also provided a forum for Quebec artists and entertainers. Quebeckers bonded around little black and white screens aglow with hockey, the comical Plouffe family, and a particularly riveting journalist named René Lévesque. Mann=s discussion of women is less felicitous. Building blocks were lacking: non-hagiographic historical writing on Quebec women=s history has been (and, according to historian Micheline Dumont, still is) rather thin. The author substitutes gendered analogy for gendered history in asserting the British Conquest was like rape; but neither the Quebec Act=s concessions to French law and custom fifteen years after conquest nor the ability to launch rebellion in 1837 suggest the battered and demoralized victim of a rape. A chapter on the 1970s that interweaves feminism with separatism and nationalism is confusing. Mann does summarize well the cautious feminism of the early 1900s, with ladies from leading families kept on a short leash by authorities such Montreal=s Bishop Bruchesi, who defined feminism as the >zeal of woman for all those noble causes in the sphere to which Providence has assigned her.= Such pontifications helped postpone female franchise until 1940, over twenty years behind most provinces. In 1980, as the author colourfully recounts, some fifteen thousand selfproclaimed >Yvettes= (the docile girl featured in traditional Quebec schoolbooks) rallied to the >No= side in the referendum campaign, the event that closes the book. Mann writes so vividly, and synthesizes most themes so well, that one wishes for more. The work would benefit, for example, from revision to include scholarship since 1980. Although two chapters on the Rebellion decades remain an excellent introduction to the subject, Allan Greer=s exposition of popular leadership now questions older hierarchical assumptions . Perhaps presciently, Mann entitled the chapter on the Quiet Revolution >Noisy Evolution=; and indeed work by Michael Behiels subsequently revealed how the intellectual groundwork for the Lesage era was laid in the 1950s. Readers, often drawn to Quebec history because of concern with contemporary politics, will wish for an updated last chapter to cover the rise of new parties, the cliffhanging 1995 referendum on sovereignty, and other recent instalments of >the Dream.= We can only hope for a sequel to this engaging survey of the fabled and too-often >foreign= province next door. (JAN NOEL) Douglas Walton. Legal Argumentation and Evidence humanities 113 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 Pennsylvania State University Press. xvii, 374. US $65.00 Douglas Walton is a prominent scholar in the field of argumentation theory. In this book he aims to show how argumentation theory can be applied to many aspects of legal argumentation. The book will be of interest to a variety of specialists, but also to others; as Walton says, anyone interested in legal argumentation will find it helpful as an introduction to the basic principles of legal reasoning and forms of argument. For the purpose of modelling legal argumentation, most previous books on legal logic have concentrated almost exclusively, Walton notes, on deductive or inductive logic. But Walton contends that a number of significant argument-types used in law are neither deductively valid nor inductively strong but fall into a >third category of arguments= and that the reasoning in such arguments - >plausible reasoning= - is the most important kind in legal argumentation. Walton uses the notion of plausible reasoning to construct a >new= theory of evidence. The theory says, roughly, that something is evidence if it is inferred by plausible reasoning from >initial impressions (appearances that seem to be veridical) of a (credible) person= and then used >to gain acceptance of something that was in...