Rhetorical Structure and Judicial Reasoning in Civil Law: A Move-Analysis Model Applied to Judgments

Abstract

The article proposes a model of legal discourse analysis that conceives the judicial decision as a macro-genre and segments it into macromoves, moves, and rhetorical steps. This structure is linked to operations of judicial reasoning—such as interpretation and subsumption—in order to observe how the text unfolds the justification of the decision. The model is illustrated through the analysis of a 1912 judgment and a 1959 plenary decision of the Supreme Court of Chile. This exercise tests the procedure and describes its strengths and limits. The study shows how textual organization is connected to reasoning operations and to ideological horizons that can be inferred from the discourse itself. Although this is a pilot corpus with limited conclusions, the article concludes that linking rhetorical segments and legal operations provides an orderly framework for comparing cases and periods, and that the model can help make explicit the rhetorical-discursive mechanisms that rulings use to decide in line with a legal policy.