Indicators of subordination and evidentiary standards in contractual denaturalization in Peruvian Supreme Court jurisprudence (2015–2025)

Abstract

Contractual denaturalization constitutes a persistent source of litigation in Peruvian labor proceedings. Despite the force of the principle of primacy of reality, the Supreme Court has not explicitly articulated the criteria of evidentiary sufficiency that guide its contractual reclassification decisions, which generates deficits in predictability and argumentative transparency. The objective of this study is to reconstruct, through systematic jurisprudential analysis, the decisional pattern of indicia-based evidentiary assessment applied by the Supreme Court in cases of contractual denaturalization between 2015 and 2025. The method used corresponds to a qualitative design applied to 37 cassation rulings, with the identification and analysis of subordination indicators and evidentiary assessment criteria. The results show that, in the purposive sample analyzed, the Court applies a consistent indicia-based pattern, grounded in the concurrence of at least two factual indicators of subordination, present in 93.3% of the cases decided on the merits, a proportion that reflects the composition of the corpus and does not constitute an estimate of outcomes across the universe of contractual denaturalization proceedings. Nevertheless, this pattern is not accompanied by a systematic explicitation of the required corroboration threshold. It is concluded that there is a gap between the coherence of the applied decisional pattern and the transparency of its argumentative grounding, compounded by the selectivity of cassation admissibility filters, which limits access to substantive review.