El precedente según sentencias de la Corte Constitucional Ecuatoriana: 2008- 2022

Abstract

Jurisprudence has played an important role in the production of law in English legal systems, where the doctrine of precedent was born. However, it had only play an auxiliary role in civil law systems. This scenario has changed with the with the constitutionalism adveniment to these systems, where the role of the constitutional judge as guarantor of rights, becomes more active, and using the interpretation of the constitution, they become in conscious law creators through their jurisprudence. Thereby, the figure of constitutional precedent was incorporated into our country's Constitution in 2008, generating the coexisting of two different ideas or theories of precedent in Ecuador. On the one hand, we have the triple reiteration ruling of the National Court of Justice, which is characteristic of civil law and has its antecedent in French cassation. On the other hand, we have the constitutional precedent of the Constitutional Court, which is more similar to common law’s precedent. The main objective of the present work is to analyze how the Constitutional Court of Ecuador has conceptualized the constitutional precedent through its jurisprudence. For this reason, we will review the Constitutional Court's sentences since 2008, focusing on how binding jurisprudence has been established, the rule of precedent, its composition, the classification of precedent, and the precedent application techniques that the Court has considered.