The technique of jurisprudence

Abstract

By describing the technical and documentary interventions that follow the judgments of the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice, the book A paixão do acesso, by Sara Munhoz, makes two original contributions to anthropological reflection on law. The first is to transform the very notion of jurisprudence by demonstrating that without sophisticated procedures for filtering, extracting, connecting and making available for consultation “legal theses” established in the rulings, with the use of digital resources, jurisprudence can no longer exist – and have repercussions – inside and outside the court. The second contribution, inseparable from the previous one, is to profoundly transform the issue of access, which gives the book its title. Instead of examining the obstacles to opening the doors of the judiciary to citizens, the counterintuitive choice of situating the observation at the “exit doors” of the court responsible for standardizing the interpretation of federal legislation deepens the understanding of how these two thresholds articulate. The ethnography explains how the joint work of human analysts and digital applications enhances the primacy of “exit doors” in determining what (and who) can pass through the court’s main entrance, by materializing its efforts to make the understandings it produces accessible and, thus, influencing the functioning of other instances of the judiciary, modulating its own entry and exit doors.