Abstract

The increasingly technical nature of Constitutional complaints urges to re-discuss an old problem in constitutional law doctrine: the discovery (pre-trial) powers of the Court, their forms and limits. Legal scholarship has pointed at the insufficiency and vagueness of current discovery rules and has invited the Court to open its procedure to greater participation from the parties. The Court, in turn, seems to perceive the need to abandon its parsimonious stance on discovery rules as it emerges from the Court's own case law. Legal scholarship has advanced many proposals to this effect and has investigated the potential risks as well as advantages of strengthening the adversary nature of the pre-trial phase. Certainly, the growing technical complexity of many of the complaints reaching the Court suggests the importance of giving ampler consideration to the context - not only legal, but also social and economic - from which constitutional questions originate and on which their effects are produced. To give wider consideration to contextual elements requires a more decisive turn to an adversary proceeding, to be understood as a «method» which enriches the argumentative possibilities available to the Court - an instrument to grant the scrutiny of the Court not much a quantitatively larger scope, but rather a qualitatively richer perspective.