Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

160function as a plenary court, in plenary chambers and in chambers. It is the STJ‘s duty to:hear appeals of the decisions made by the criminal chambers; hear appeals of the decisionsmade by the first instance committees; hear appeals in matters of law; harmonize rulings bysetting uniform jurisprudence; try crimes committed by the President of the Republic, thePresident of the Assembly of the Republic and the Prime-Minister for crimes committedduring the exercise of their Office (Prata 2005: 1149).4.1.2.3. ExpertsThe STJ currently has one presiding judge and 22 judges. STJ judges are called JuízesConselheiros. All texts from the Portuguese subcorpus were written by STJ judges. Asmentioned, what makes an acórdão different from a sentença is that an acórdão is adecision reached by at least two judges. Texts are elaborated by one Relator (the mainjudge) but signed by all judges that participated in the decision.The role of judges in the Portuguese legal system consists in discovering andapplying the appropriate law to a given case. The Portuguese judge can be seen as labouche de la loi, i.e. an interpreting entity that makes objective decisions (CastanheiraNeves 2008). The formal sources of law on which grounds of judgment are based consist ofthe statutory law (the codes) and of the positions taken by legal science (books, articleswritten by academic lawyers, etc). Although Portuguese judges also cite prior cases orprecedents (case law) in the grounds for judgment, these play a minor role in the process ofreaching a decision because they are not considered a formal source of law.4.1.2.4. MacrostructureSchematically, the acórdão consists of a certain fact to which certain values are applied.Guimarães (2004) compares the structure of the acórdão to a syllogism in which the majorpremise corresponds to the matter of law discussed, the minor premise to the facts of the