In the context of reforming the legal system of Ukraine, the issue of judicial argumentation, which is developing in modern law schools, is necessary in current conditions of law enforcement process. In this regard, there is a need to outline the problematic aspects of the use of argumentation in the Ukrainian judicial system. This article is devoted to some features of the argumentation contained in decisions of Ukrainian courts. The article describes typical problems that occur during judicial argumentation, which hinder quality of justice. The author analyzes the logical approach to judicial argumentation, argumentation based on principles, the rhetorical approach and inductive as well as deductive argumentation during proceedings in Ukrainian courts. These are some of the most widely used approaches in judicial argumentation. The article provides some recommendations that can improve argumentation in Ukrainian judicial practice. These problems can be solved by improving the level of legal culture, increasing the education of litigants and by using other methods.

Neophilological Students’ knowledge and opinions on argumentation

The aim of this paper is to present the views of university learners in the Faculty of Neophilology on argumentative text. We are interested in their theoretical knowledge of argumentation and argumentative text genres, as well as their opinions on the importance of analysing and practising different text types during foreign language courses. Furthermore, in light of our teaching experience, we can see that the task of writing an argumentative text in a foreign language course (in our case, Italian) usually turns into an activity of purely listing arguments for and against a thesis. The arguments listed are mostly of little argumentative effectiveness because they are commonplace, widespread opinions repeated in the same kind of compositions during previous educational cycles. Using questionnaire administered to 33 Polish, Spanish, and Italian students, we observed their opinions and knowledge of argumentative discourse.