La justice déçue. Les sens de la justice à partir des rituels du champ judiciaire

Abstract

In this article, I examine the way in which actors in the Brazilian judicial field imagine, elaborate, and use the category of justice, drawing on my experience at a law school in Brazil's capital. This experience takes the form of ethnography, a method that transforms into objective data what initially appears as an individual and subjective experience. The data was structured around the idea that many practices in the field could be understood in terms of rituals. In this way, it was possible to observe that these actors used several contradictory criteria of justice simultaneously and strategically in the same concrete case. It should be emphasized that the equitable application of the norm was not perceived as a criterion of justice, but as the expression of a misunderstanding of the most central values of the judicial field.

Keywords

• moral order
• Rui Barbosa
• differentiated treatment
• the Brazilian little way
• supplication