Towards the Semantics of Constitutive in Judicial Reasoning

The aim of the paper is to supply a contribution to the semantics of constitutive, as confined to the scope of judicial reasoning. More precisely, the aim of the paper is to inquire what links the use of constitutive in three distinct (seemingly unrelated) issues on adjudication, namely: (a) the procedural classification of different sorts of judicial decisions, (b) the epistemological debate on the very nature of judicial decisions, and (c) a logical query on the import constitutive rules might be taken to have in affecting the sort and/or the nature of judicial decisions in which they might occur as the legal premiss, grounding the solution of the case. The attempt to fix some markers towards the semantics of constitutive in judicial reasoning will have Alchourrón and Bulygin's analyses as a main point of reference.