Legal argumentation as a tool for ensuring the effectiveness of law enforcement activity: genesis and modern development

Abstract

The effectiveness of exercising public authority increasingly depends not only on formal compliance with legal provisions but also on the ability of state bodies to provide adequate justification for their decisions and to ensure their persuasiveness, predictability, and conformity with the rule of law. The purpose of the article is to examine the genesis of legal argumentation, identify the main stages of its development, and clarify its role as a tool for ensuring the effectiveness of law enforcement activity under contemporary conditions. The methodological framework of the study includes dialectical, historical-legal, formal-legal, systemic-structural, comparative-legal, and logical-semantic methods, as well as the method of generalization of judicial practice. The article analyzes the evolution of scholarly approaches to understanding legal argumentation, from formal-normative models to modern concepts of legal reasoning grounded in rationality, communicative interaction, legal certainty, the rule of law, and the protection of human rights. The main directions of the development of the theory of legal argumentation and their influence on contemporary approaches to law enforcement practice are revealed. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, which served as the basis for systematizing modern standards of legal argumentation, including the requirements of the effectiveness of procedural safeguards, legal certainty, proportionality, protection of legitimate expectations, proper reasoning of decisions, and a human rights-oriented approach. The study proposes a set of criteria for high-quality legal argumentation in law enforcement, including legality, substantiation, proportionality, legal certainty, observance of procedural guarantees, verifiability of argumentation, legitimacy, and a human-centered approach. The practical significance of the results obtained lies in their potential application in the preparation and justification of procedural decisions by law enforcement authorities, the improvement of law enforcement practice, and the educational process in teaching legal disciplines.