The new owners of legal knowledge: The dispute for the occupation of spaces of meaning of Law in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to discuss, from empirical data on Brazilian legal organizations, the power relations among magistracy, public advocacy, private law and scientific academy, starting from a relation between the notion of Pierre Bourdieu’s symbolic field and Michael Foucault’s concept of episteme. This research uses data collected in mass legal sites, whose publications of essays, articles and opinions, allows an analysis on the different types of discourse and the different forms of appropriation of legal knowledge. The information collected permits us to infer that advocacy lost the political influence it had in the twentieth century because other legal actors conquered the spaces of production of sense of law, especially the judiciary. However, there are new resistance movements being drawn on the legal field. The public advocacy and the scientific academy, in quite different ways, have presented political discourses of opposition to the judicial protagonism of the judiciary in the production of law.

Keywords: lawyer, academy, judges, political speech, legal field.