Los argumentos interpretativos utilizados en las reglas jurisprudenciales emitidas por la primera Corte Constitucional del Ecuador

Abstract

The motivation of judicial decisions in modern democratic societies has acquired special relevance. Motivating their judgements, the judges interpret the legal texts (sentences) that support their decision and justify this interpretation by arguments called interpretative for this utility. Because of such relevance, the Constitution of 2008 established that judges are obligated to motivate their decisions. On the other hand, the Constitution of 2008 also created the Constitutional Court, the highest body for the control and interpretation of the Constitution, which is allowed to issue, by judgments, jurisprudential rules. In a country with a civil law tradition such as Ecuador, this faculty generated an unprecedented transformation of the sources of the legal system. Therefore, this research identifies the interpretative arguments that the first Constitutional Court of Ecuador used in the judgments that contain jurisprudential rules. In consequence, the author exposes the conceptions and typologies of the interpretative arguments formulated by the law philosophers Robert Alexy, Neil MacCormick and Giovanni Tarello; registers the interpretative arguments expressed by the Constitutional Court in the indicated sentences according to the conception and typology formulated by Tarello; and, finally, determines the uses frequency of the interpretative arguments. In general, this research found that, in the judgments under review, the first Constitutional Court of Ecuador employed 263 interpretive arguments to motivate its attributions of meaning to legal texts, and the most used arguments were the systematic argument, authoritative argument and argument from principles.