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This paper discusses the relationship between the idea of coherence and the legal order set up by the European Community. It focuses on a specific dimension of this relationship and shows how the appeals to coherence made by the European Court of Justice have shaped a particular branch of the European legal order, namely, the judicial review of Community acts. The analysis of the Court of Justice's case law in this field shows that in its extensive use of coherence the Court of Justice explored and brought into play different types of coherence and, while it failed to distinguish between them, it made use of sorts of coherence that thus far legal theorists have disregarded. The article concludes that a closer collaboration between legal theory and legal practice would be profitable for both legal theorists and Community law specialists.

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In this paper the argument from coherence is submitted to a critical analysis. First, it is argued to be a complex form of coordinative argumentation, structured on various argumentative levels. Then, using the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation a distinction is brought out between two basic forms of the argument from coherence: in one use this argument occurs as a sequence of two symptomatic arguments; in the other use we have a main symptomatic argument supported by a subordinate pragmatic argument. Finally, from an evaluative point of view it is assessed whether the argument from coherence can be found acceptable as a tool for settling disputes. It is claimed that in general, we can welcome this argumentative structure as sound and fully acceptable provided that we are aware of the interpretative discretion its use implies.

Recourse to precedents in legal adjudication is a source of intriguing theoretical challenges and serious practical difficulties. That is especially so when we have to do not with domestic precedents but with foreign ones, that is, with decisions taken by foreign courts and international judicial institutions, particularly when there is no formal obligation for a court to resort to foreign law. Can a case decided by the judiciary of a different legal ordereven if that case is remote and that legal order operates under different procedural rules and substantive laws-have any bearing on a dispute arising domestically here and now? Should such a foreign precedent be acknowledged to have any (formal) binding force on the case in question? How could the practice of following foreign precedents be justified? This paper is primary meant to lay the theoretical basis on which those questions can be addressed. The basis on which we proceed in answering those questions essentially lies in a theory of legal reasoning that, for lack of a better phrase, can be labelled a dialectical approach informed by standards of discursive rationality.

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