ABSTRACT
Three claims are defended here. First, there are no distinct basic operations in the process of the application of law, like balancing and analogy. Second, analogy has two stages: the purely heuristic stage, and the justification-transmitting stage, which can be identified with the process of balancing legal principles. Thus analogy is shown to be partly reducible to balancing. Third, two competing views of analogy – rule-based and factual – are refuted.
