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The article describes the potential of abductive legal reasoning as a means of systematically exploring the role of inferences within legal reasoning. Starting out from the structures of abduction as originally presented by Peirce in his four-horsemen example, the author points to the fact that Peirce actually employed a hypothesis that targeted an institutional fact. Hence the abductive inference has a great potential for categorising new phenomena under norms, yet it is undertheorised within the field of law as compared to other fields of science. The article presents the idea of comparison in the frame of "double abduction" as an important feature of legal reasoning. a severe row. Anne infers that Mike and Harry have become friends again. (This inference is the weak form of abduction.) 1 In the strong form of abduction, the IBE theory renders both an initial selection of several explanations and additionally a scheme for choosing the best of these explanations (Iranzo 2007). Hence, abductive reasoning, in its developed form, offers the best explanation available based on the perceiver's background knowledge and new information gathered.The intellectual operations explained above have many commonalities with solving legal questions. Yet the subject of abductive reasoning within law is scarcely investigated. In this article I will explore the possible potential that abductive reasoning holds within law and legal reasoning.