The ethos of the judge and its influence on the resolution of conflicts

Abstract

The word “conflicts” is fundamental to think about the judge's performance and its rhetorical importance in the globalized world. The judge is an institutional representative of the State, possessing an authorized discourse and with the assured right to launch an imposing response to the world, protected by the force of the authoritarian nature of the institutions themselves. This vision reinforces the rationality of judging, removes from the judge the idiosyncratic aspects of the person acting as a representative of the State, confines his actions to a position mediated by institutionalized knowledge and imposes a gesture that contemplates only one angle of the Law: the analytical-deductive bias. However, maintaining the ethos of the judge and of an institution requires constant rhetorical action, which, in turn, requires coherently regulating the speech and actions of the men who lead and move the pathos, the passionate aspects necessary to ensure that what has been said about the institutional event is plausible. The logos considers that whatever is at issue in the rhetorical situation concerns not only the text, but the discourse, and the discourse is replete with contrivances not always confessable or demonstrated. The logos, then, brings out factors underlying the textual surface, for it elicits, through discourse, the contrivances that show how an event in the world was treated in a specific context. The engagement of these constituent parts of the rhetorical triad, when associated with the development of each one of them, constitutes the rhetorical action of the men who represent the institution. On the other side, even in the juridical action, there is fundamentally the doxa, the universe of opinions which having immense and sometimes unusual dimensions, moves the rhetorical action and brings concord or discord. All these factors are amalgamated for the constitution of the judge's ethos in conflict situations.