The strength of mold: reflections on legal language and access to justice in federal special courts of the Espírito Santo state

Abstract

This article is about the relationship between the teaching of law, professional practice and the possibilities of legal language for the extension or reduction of access to justice. The theoretical basis is the theory of Pierre Bourdieu’s fields and his critical approach on the role of language in the organization of the fields of fights for the symbolic capital. The conflicting basis of Bourdieu’s theory establishes the habitus as a means of balance of the conflicts within the social field. The habitus is the rule of organization of the field of vision (and division) of its members. In the legal field, the professionals demarcate their monopolized territories of actuation (spaces of power) from the field of language all their own. The understanding of a same language constitutes delimitations of spaces of power among legal practitioners (started) and profane (uninitiated) in the legal field, with serious repercussions on society. But the incorporation of habitus of the legal field starts in law school, where students understand the ideological hierarchy of the own field by the exercise of violence not perceived as will, from a training out of context and anachronistic, reproduced later in professional performance as naturalization of inequality and the inability of transformation of reality. The route will include methodological participant observation, to capture the expressional form of social actors in the set of hearings. Interviews were held with the attendees in Special Juvenile Federal Court of the Espírito Santo State, Brazil, for qualitative analyses about the perceptions of the parties involved in the process, in order to demonstrate the non- understanding of the public interviewed about the procedural process and the language used.