Ônus de argumentação, relações de prioridade e decisão jurídica: mecanismos de controle e de redução da incerteza na subidealidade do sistema jurídico

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to analyze the nature and functions of burdens of argumentation, within the context of their relationship with the structure of the legal system and their role in legal reasoning. Such analysis understands law as limited domain, subject to constraints that can be analytically represented by a three-level approach. According to this view, law and legal reasoning are extrinsically, intrinsically and institutionally constrained. In this complex scenario, the argument of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it claims that burdens of argumentation are necessary components of a legal system that contains rules and principles. On the other hand, by looking at their structure, it claims that these burdens can be understood as effects of rules and standards that establish normative priority relations. On the basis of these analyses, I argue that burdens of argumentation are mechanisms of control and stabilization of the uncertainty that characterizes the suboptimal character of law. First, they make it easier to justify the maintenance in concreto of a preexistent relationship of priority between different principles. Second, they make it harder to invert these relationships of priority. Lastly, burdens of argumentation create stopping points in legal reasoning whenever there is uncertainty about whether the development of new chains of arguments is enough to justify the maintenance or the inversion, in a concrete case, of a given normative relationship of priority.