Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

216The first time an expert was consulted occurred when the corpus was built and asignificant difference in the length of the Portuguese and Canadian texts was identified(section 4.1.4). In order to understand the reason underlying such a difference, we appealedto the macrostructure of the texts as well as to the legal principles that Portuguese andCanadian judges have to follow when writing a judgment. We then asked the Canadianlegal expert, Patrick Forget, Professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal if theprinciple of ratio decidendi (the application of precedents) could justify the fact that theCanadian texts were twice as long as the Portuguese texts. Professor Forget explained to usthat ―in common law case law there is usually a discussion on the precedents that applies tothe case at hand as well as on the meaning of those precedents (the ratio decidendi) farmore elaborated than in the civil law jurisdictions‖, that ―historically, the doctrinal traditionwas less developed in common law jurisdictions than in the civil jurisdictions‖, and that―today most scholars will acknowledge that the SCC judges consider themselves as beingsome sort of (surrogate) professors of law‖. This kind of information seemed to indicatethat, when compared to Portuguese judges, Canadian judges had to and were allowed todiscuss a lot more matters in their decisions, which could very well be the reason whyCanadian texts are twice as long as Portuguese texts.The second time we consulted an expert occurred when we were distinguishing themeanings of the verbs that we had selected and we wanted to clarify a given meaning thatwas completely new to us. For instance, the Portuguese verb absolver evokes threedifferent scenarios: in the first one, the judge decides that the defendant is not guilty of thecrime he is charged (absolver do crime); in the second one, the judge decides that thedefendant does not have to do what the author of the petition requested (absolver dopedido); and, in the third one, the judge decides that the defendant does not have to be triedbecause there is some sort of irregularity in the case (absolver da instância). Whereas thefirst scenario is known even to a layperson, the last two are not. Thus, despite sound corpusevidence that we were dealing with three different meanings, we wanted to make sure that