The Reason that Would Serve any Other: Case-specificity, Provenance and Article 489, § 1º, III, of the CPC/2015

When they decide, courts publicly claim to have been corrected by the law rather than by themselves. This article does not ask whether that claim is sincere, nor whether a correct answer exists within the legal material, nor whether the decision is just. It asks what a public procedure would have to produce in order to license it. It argues that Article 489, §1º, III of the Brazilian Code of Civil Procedure — which denies the status of a reasoned decision to one invoking grounds that would equally justify any other decision — is, in its logical structure, an evidential-discrimination requirement self-imposed by the very community subject to it, and that Brazilian scholarship reads it exclusively in the register of procedural invalidity. Reconstructed as a test and rigorously applied, the provision proves able to establish case-specificity but not provenance: a decision may fully satisfy it and remain indifferent between the hypothesis that the text constrained and the hypothesis that the interpretive practice recognising it constrained, because the reasons that particularise are drawn from the very repertoire whose provenance is at issue, and because the institutionally available route of verification is comparison with earlier states of the community itself. The test is applied symmetrically to both descriptions and does not favour the second either, so that the result concerns the procedure rather than the truth of the descriptions. Hence the wider finding: in the domain where the object is available, public and fixed, and where the practice itself has legislated its own criterion of discrimination, the claim of provenance remains unvindicated — what is lacking is not access, but a route of access that does not pass through the description whose correctness is at issue. No verdict on the legitimacy of adjudication follows, and none is offered; what follows is a question, deliberately left open.

DIETRICH, Pablo; DIETRICH, Maurília Gabriela da Silva. The Reason that Would Serve any Other: Case-specificity, Provenance and Article 489, § 1º, III, of the CPC/2015. SSRN, 2026. DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.7663238.