This paper defends the central role of syllogism as the structure of legal reasoning, whithout denying the important part played by informal, probabilistic or rhetorical reasoning. To justify, one needs to cite universal legal sentences (major premises), and the particular facts which are relevant to them (minor premises), the claim or decision being the conclusion of the syllogism. To be sure, problems may arise: problems of interpretation of the statute; of proof of the facts; of classification of facts as instances of the universals deployed in the statute (as well as problems of evaluation of facts when the statute contains a value-expression); or problems of relevancy of the norm (when applying precedents). All that requires giving reasons for reading the syllogism in a certain way, a reasoning that falls beyond formal logic and ends up to be decisive. But syllogism "is what provide the framework in which the other arguments make sense as legal arguments
