Arguendo In development

Try the example

Legal reasoning you can inspect.

Arguendo is a legal reasoning workbench in development, initially focused on California complaint and demurrer analysis. Its aim is to help lawyers examine how source passages, interpretations, and competing rules lead to a conclusion — and where support is missing: what an argument depends on, how its support can be inspected, and what changes when one assumption changes.

This example uses prepared text interpretations and rules, with saved results generated by Arguendo’s reasoning engine. The browser selects and displays those results — nothing here reads documents live. Detailed provenance is at the foot of the page.

Change an assumption. Follow the reasoning.

The bird example is deliberately tiny so a first-time visitor can follow, end to end, the chain the project is built around: the words of a document, the interpretations a reader accepts, the rules that compete — including exceptions — and a conclusion that holds only under those assumptions. It makes that one part easy to inspect, step by step; it does not demonstrate complete legal analysis.

A useful first move: — then watch which arguments, and which conclusion, change. Reset example restores everything.

DOCUMENT

the text, its prepared interpretation, and the answer under your choices

MACHINE

the theory behind the answer, read stage by stage

Why this matters

The run above answers, in one place and in plain language, the questions Arguendo is being developed to help lawyers examine in real matters:

  • Which passage supports an interpretation? Each interpretation sits beside the highlighted words it rests on.
  • Which rules and competing arguments bear on the conclusion? The stages, the diagram, and the tables show every rule, attack, preference, and exception that did work in this run.
  • Which assumptions does the result depend on? “What would change the answer” lists the single changes that flip it.
  • What remains unsupported or unexamined? Rejected interpretations, sentences nobody used, and facts nobody states stay visible instead of vanishing.

Applied to real complaint passages and California demurrer grounds, that same chain is what the workbench under development is meant to trace. This page shows the pattern on prepared inputs; the parts of the workflow not shown here are not finished, and nothing here is legal advice.