Summary

Today lawyers cannot ignore doctrines dealing with morals and fairness. The idea of fairness should be reflected both in the legislation drafted by draftsmen and in decisions rendered by the judiciary. As decision-makers must convince the audience of the correctness of their decisions in order to ensure the functioning of the society, decisions rendered must be in conformity with the valid values. The author looks at the role of fairness in argumentation in general, examining, on the one hand, simple cases where the applicable rules are easy to find, and, on the other, complex cases which require an analysis of the legal system as a whole and where the idea of fairness has a significant role to play. In the author’s opinion, the idea of fairness is also relevant in the selection of methods of interpretation. Further, the author focuses on the idea of fairness in the context of Estonian law and primarily looks at decisions of the Supreme Court, and, in particular, at the arguments of fairness resorted to in decisions of the Constitutional Review Chamber. As a result of the present and future growing influence of the EC law on the Estonian legal system, the author also analyses judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Communities.