Ethos impartial dans les arrêts de la Cour de cassation

Abstract

When sentencing a judge cannot under any circumstance express personal opinions, prejudices or display any kind of personal values. Sitting above all the French legal system the Cour de Cassation has therefore a duty of role modelling this which includes its respect to the basic principle of impartiality. Obviously the impartiality of the Court rests on a fundamental competency to sentence strictly based upon the law. Still and beyond this fact we need to ask ourselves the question of how the respect of this principle is shown in its decisions now published online in their full version. If we stay in the theoretical framework of the argumentative analysis (Amossy, 2010), we will show how the impartiality ethos allows the legitimation of the Court discourse. From the analysis of a selection of sentences from the Criminal court of the Cour de Cassation, our goal is to then examine this strategy of argumentation shaped within the scope of rigid genre through the organization of the text, and a permanently referenced reasoning.