Abstract

VENTHUR, Tania Busch  and  SALDIAS, Abraham Quezada. When Civil Society Speaks, Do the Judges Listen?: Analysis of the Public Hearings before the Chilean Constitutional Court and their Impact on the Constitutional Judgments. Estud. Socio-Juríd [online]. 2022, vol.24, n.1, pp.201-232.  Epub Aug 03, 2022. ISSN 0124-0579.  https://doi.org/10.12804/revistas.urosario.edu.co/sociojuridicos/a.10093.

This paper presents the analysis of a decade of public hearings convened by the Chilean Constitutional Court, seeking to determine if their conduct impacted the argumentation of its constitutional judgments. The question is whether those hearings enrich the deliberation and democratize the constitutional interpretation, as indicated by the theory. The authors expose the theoretical treatment of the institution with special emphasis on comparative Latin American experiences. Then, they analyze the judgments that resolve cases in which hearings have been convened in order to identify what criteria the court used, were they referenced in the argumentation of the rulings? If they were referenced, what was their argumentative role? The work allowed concluding that the information and arguments contributed by civil society to public hearings are underused in the argumentation processes of judicial decisions and that the deliberative and democratizing potential of the institution regarding constitutionality control processes does not deploy in practice.

Keywords : Public hearings; Chilean Constitutional Court; constitutional judgments; participation of civil society; constitutional judge.

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