Certiorari, significance and doctrine of the precedent in Argentina

Abstract

The extraordinary federal appeal (hereinafter REF) constitutes a highly complex legal and procedural institute. The Supreme Court, as the highest judicial body of the Nation, to whom the National Constitution has assigned to be its guardian, is not freely accessible for any matter that a pilgrim tries to take for its own sake. You must have reasons, and a case, one of those that deserves to be treated before your podium. It is totally reasonable that the court with the greatest authority and prestige in a country, head of a State Power, is reserved to act only on those issues that are really relevant for society, for institutions, for the Nation, or to delimit and establish criteria on certain topics and subjects. For this function, the rules must be clear. If there are only certain questions that the CSJN can resolve in the area of its jurisdiction appealed, then it is necessary to clearly know which are those that enter that area, and which are those that remain outside. This clarity can be very difficult to achieve when the parameters on which it depends are subject to the interpretation that the Court itself dynamically performs as a result of its decisions. Although the problem is not the interpretation of the access parameters itself, but the lack of externalization of such interpretations. It should be considered that this dynamic and permanent construction that the CSJN is carrying out, in relation to the requirements that it ultimately demands for the REF, is also necessary for the court to have a margin of maneuverability over the conceptions, values and ideas that their decisions are called to be resolved at all times. It is clear, and it is convenient, that the Supreme Court is absolutely free to vary the content of the indeterminate legal concepts that the REF entails, in order to give an adequate and fair response to the challenges that society poses at a given moment. That is why, in the normative regulation of the REF, that fine and delicate balance must be found by virtue of which, without restricting the margin of maneuver of the high court, clear rules and guidelines are also established for legal operators and defendants. The present work aims to analyze what it is, or what we can understand by transcendence, and then analyze how the REF has worked in relation to it.