Judges, their associations, and politics: notes of a research agenda

Jurists against democracy

“…In this regard, two records seem important as assumptions molding the sociability of the legal field in Brazil. The first is in the format of the legal elites' education, the formalist tradition and the bonds of solidarity built in the professional and corporate arena of the so-called legal community, which social sciences literature has already explored under various aspects (CARVALHO, 1996;BONELLI;OLIVEIRA, 2003;ALMEIDA, 2014;VIANNA;BOM JARDIM, 2015). The second point is in the investigation of the relations created and maintained among the members of the legal and judicial elite and the agents representing the interests of such other areas of the social system as economics and politics (Halliday 1999;Almeida 2016;Engelmann and Penna 2014), and which materialize also in the institutionalization of reforms of the justice system itself according to parameters defined by international and transnational agencies guided by the wide array of the north's global market interests (Dezalay and Garth 2002;Rodríguez-Garavito 2011).…”