Abstract

Legal certainty is one of the «grand recites» of the law. As far as legal certainty is not conceived any more as a fact by lawyers, predictability and controllability are not the proper substitutes for certainty because, logically, the first two are possibilities in the future, whereas the latter is a fact in the present. The ideological character of certainty is particularly clear in the construction of truth during the trial. Under a sociological point of view, Max Weber has shown that the determination of facts is a matter of selection. Selections as well as decisions are subjective by nature: They are contingent and therefore uncertain. Legal certainty is nonetheless a necessary condition of possibility for people's trust in the law.