What do judges of a constitutional court do? The common answer to this question is: They
consider political issues based on legal criteria. Constitutional courts present themselves
and are regarded as an expert group which decides by the means of the constitution. The
paper, however, shows that judges of constitutional courts do not only use statutory
interpretation of the respective constitution within their argumentation.The general aim of
this paper is to present a method for a qualitative content analysis of the constitutional
court’s decisions: a text-immanent and in-depth analysis of the styles of argumentation
within the published decision. As I am interested in the impact of the constitutional court’s
decision on the political system, more precisely on public debates and public opinion, the
essential feature of each pattern of argumentation is the way in which an argument creates
persuasiveness. I analyzed three coherent decisions of the German Federal Constitutional
Court on asylum politics by which I identified nine different patterns of argumentation,
which I named as follows: Argument by Analogy, Argument by Authority, Argument by
Purpose, Argument by Declarative Statement, Missing Argument, Supporting Argument,
European Community Argument, Argument by Experience, International Law Argument.