摘要：Contemporary Brazilian Civil Law undergoes a moment of holistic metamorphoses, driven by two qualitative and contiguous changes: the downfall of traditional Rechtsaat and the subsequent rise of contemporary constitutional state – which implies a new approach to the tensions between legislature and adjudication – and the re-apprehension of the role of supreme courts – as consequence of this approach. In this scenario, expectations are no longer directed to an idealized legislator, whilst the historical Civil Law distrust on judiciary ceases, as lawyers assimilate the cleavage between text and norm and, consequently, the unsoundness of traditional bound-decision-making. These times of change and instability call into question the sense of legal certainty, which progressively extrapolates the boundaries of its formal dimension (confined to formal legality) and reaffirms itself as a substantial axiom (proper to contemporary theories of legal argumentation). Judicial precedent hence appears as a valuable tool, whose content this work aims at scrutinizing, departing from distinct jurisprudential contributions to finally propose a new point of departure to present-day civilian scholarship. This article hence contextualizes legal certainty in dealing with general clauses as a problem, outlines possible solutions extracted by a comprehensive sketch of contemporary Brazilian Civil Law, in order to turn to Jurisprudence and shape the conceptual key that allows for the resolution of the identified problem.
关键词：Substantial legal certainty; general clause; judicial precedent; superior courts; supreme courts.
