In 1969, the language philosopher John R. Searle published his book “Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language,” wherein he developed the theory of speech acts of John L. Austin into a more normative direction. Though the philosophy of language is not the main issue of this article, Searle spoke out, for the first time, on a fundamental distinction between two different kinds of rules, namely constitutive and regulative rules. Actually, since that time the distinction between these two different types of rules has become fairly common in legal theory, but not in criminal procedure law or in the theory of procedure law. Only sporadically have German legal scholars gone into this distinction. This is astonishing with regard to criminal procedure law in particular because, even before 1969, some scholars had construed procedural rules as rules of a game. In doing so, they addressed an important characteristic of constitutive rules, namely the expression of the conditions of a certain result. However, the construction of procedural norms as rules of a game is imprecise because not all procedural norms actually work in this way. This becomes clear when one transfers Searle's distinction to criminal procedure law.