This text draws on jurisprudence and moral philosophy to develop a formal model of argumentation called the pleadings game. From a technical perspective, the work can be viewed as an extension of recent argumentation-based approaches to non-monotonic logic: the game is dialogical rather than mono-logical; the validity and priority of defeasible rules is subject to debate; and resource limitations are acknowledged by rules for fairly dividing the burdens of representation and proof among the players. Gordon’s work evaluates jurisprudential theories of argumentation and reasoning in the context of the US commercial law on secured transactions.