Balancing principles and a fortiori reasoning

The purpose of the following pages is not to address all the specific points foreseen in Giovanni Sartor’s paper, let alone to address his sophisticated formal analysis. I merely aim at providing for some comments around some topics of Sartor’s paper. I start by briefly commenting on the main premises and goals of Sartor’s paper. I move on to focus on the structural differences between rules and principles by stressing that the difference resides in the generic (unspecific) hypothetical action foreseen in the antecedent of the latter. Subsequently, I briefly go through the concept of factors (namely principle-promoting and principle-demoting factors) against the conceptual background of the defining properties of cases: those which, within the Universe of Properties, are present or absent in legal cases. Lastly, I finish by expanding on some possibilities (and lack thereof) concerning the use of a fortiori arguments in the comparison between past (source) and present (target) balances.