The Role and Status of Analogy in the History of Legal Systems; With an emphasis on the Practice of International Arbitration Tribunals

Argument is the life of law. In order to prove a legal issue, the science of law goes through the tortuous path of judicial reasoning to prove the legal fact of a civil or criminal case. The traditional concepts of legal reasoning and the process of inferring legal rules in international law, in addition to the traditional basic forms of logic, are based on analogical reasoning. Analogy as one of the common methods of reasoning in international legal system is not limited to the decisions of international courts, but it can be stated that the judicial decisions is only an important instance of the functions of analogical reasoning. Otherwise, this type of reasoning plays significant role in different and wide range of law particularly in the awards of international arbitration tribunals. International arbitral tribunals have been widely used analogy and legal transplant by referring to the jurisprudence of domestic courts on the one hand and to the former decisions or awards of arbitral tribunals and other international courts on the other. The analysis of the awards of arbitration tribunals shows that analogy is one of the effective methods for filling gaps and silences of law, eliminating the ambiguity and brevity of the rules and development in this field of international law. Arbitrators often explain the driving force of analogy based on justice and fairness and the idea of like cases should be treated alike or establishing the uniformity and coherence of the system. This paper, while considering the jurisprudential-legal aspects of the concept of analogy and the ground of its formation and historical background in the Islamic legal system and other legal systems, by using the descriptive-analytical method is focused on analyzing the role of analogy in the awards of international arbitration tribunals.