Who does the Constitutional Colombian Court address to? The Judge and the Universal Audience

Abstract

Law can be conceived as the result of a process in which the judge (speaker) must obtain society’s adhesion (audience) to which his decisions are addressed. This article argues in favor of this thesis through the application of Perelman theory of argumentation to our legal reality, and particularly in the field of Constitutional law. Consequently, and to develop this idea, the text has four parts. First, some general notions of Perelman’s theory are described. In the second part some relations between the judge and his audience will be exposed, as well as some arguments to justify why the Constitutional Court can be thought as speaking to a universal audience. In the third part we will show by means of a difficult case how the Constitutional Court uses the premises of the audience for convincing the universal audience. In the fourth part, the arguments presented are synthesized and it is concluded that the audience is the central protagonist in the definition of which Law is, insofar as it is the duty of the orator to adapt to the audience. In this same section, and as a conclusion, the democratic powers of Perelman’s theory Perelman, as well as the methodological implications in the analysis of the Law are indicated.