ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses basic symbols to represent the parties to disputes, in order to develop a preliminary means of expressing arguments. The analysis will treat contentious cases only as examples of rights balancing, without regard to the legal status of judicial holdings in any given jurisdiction. Translation is important to have reliable ways of translating between symbolic expressions and natural language. Statements are rarely meaningful in isolation. Logical operators are tools used for stating relationships among statements in unambiguous form. One of the principal functions of standard logic is to test arguments for their validity. For that purpose, detailed attention must be paid to the precise meanings of operators. In view of the focus on arguments adduced in substantive rights disputes, the corpus to be examined includes only judgments on the merits of disputes, without reference to issues of procedure or jurisdiction.
