Chapter 2 concluded that coherence is linked to legal reasoning, but where exactly within the process of legal reasoning does coherence fit? Chapter 3 presents and contrasts two views about how legal reasoning is deployed — the positivist view and the non-positivist (interpretivist) view. Both agree that the law carries expectations with respect to the achievement of certain values, i.e., legal certainty and substantive correctness (justice). But they disagree about the relationship between those two values when it comes to legal reasoning, hence the different models for coherence that each view gives rise to. The positivist view gives rise to a model of ‘double coherence’, whereas the non-positivist view gives rise to a model of ‘single coherence’. The chapter ultimately sides with the latter view. Two grounds are offered for this conclusion. Firstly, the core assumptions of the positivist view regarding the different processes of legal reasoning allegedly at play when one is deciding easier and harder cases do not seem to hold. Secondly, following the positivist view may result in certain methodological pitfalls for adjudicators which the non-positivist view seems to avoid.

The change in the Founding Contract that political leaders initiated on 11 February 2010 put great pressure on the legal set-up of the euro that remained largely unaffected. When the European Court of Justice had to rule on the actions to which the change had given rise it consequently found itself between a rock and a hard place. It was not in a position to strike down actions that had been crucial to the single currency’s survival. Yet, in order to approve of them it had to engage in a Herculean struggle with the law that still largely reflected a stability conception from the past. This chapter examines this approval. Two cases are central: Pringle and Gauweiler. Both cases ultimately turned around the question whether and to what extent the law can accommodate the currency union’s new stability conception, characterized by the need to protect financial stability. Most of the Court’s reasoning in these cases is sound or, where it is strained, could have been justified through the use of different arguments. At one crucial point, however, the Court encounters the limits of what can be justified through legal reasoning alone.

This book chapter compares civil litigation in the courts of first and second instances in Taiwan in 2010–2015 with that in U.S. federal courts in 2010–2013. The two judicial systems, as expected, are different in many ways. Settlement rates in Taiwan, even broadly defined, were below 25%; in U.S. federal court, they exceed 70%. In Taiwan, summary judgments were basically non-existent; in U.S. federal court, they represent nearly a third of merits judgments. Rates of appeal in Taiwan are nearly 10 times higher (27% versus 3%) than in the U.S. federal courts. And yet judges in Taiwan, at least those in the court of first instance, handled cases more quickly than their colleagues in the U.S. federal courts—indeed, twice as fast. Yet, the two judicial systems respond similarly when encountering simple debt collection cases. These cases, large in number in both systems, fail to settle as standard theories would predict. Instead, these disputes are frequently resolved through default judgments. This chapter provides cautionary lessons for future empirical comparative civil procedure studies.