As ascensões semi-antipolíticas dos ministros do Supremo Tribunal Federal

Abstract

Even though there is a growing social and academic perception of the political relevance of the Supreme Federal Tribunal, we still know little about how its members become judges in its ranks. The literature on the topic focuses its members mainly as the objects of a social process, chosen by political forces or recruited due to the influence of the acting judges. There are two gaps in our knowledge about the social production of the judges of the Brazilian Supreme Court. The first gap regards how the process happens beyond its formal procedures. The second, regarding how the people under consideration for the appointment make their nominations happen. How do Ministers of the Supreme Federal Tribunal make their own appointment and nomination happen? To answer this question, I construed an approach of cognitive sociology inspired by Alfred Schutz (1979), Erving Goffman (1959, 1986) e Harold Garfinkel (1967, 1986). Due to the impossibility of observing this process directly, I have derived answers from the analysis of Oral History interviews of twenty-one judges from that court, from which I surmised the conceptual frameworks and cognitive keys that they mobilize to give their accounts intelligibility and legitimacy to their belonging to the tribunal. Under the frame of “the Supreme cannot be either demanded neither refused”, they describe a “work” realized so they are “considered”, appointed and nominated to the court, comprised of gathering support among a specific share of the legal community or key figures among the members of partisan politics. The members anchor the likelihood of their accounts and the legitimacy of their trajectories in particular manner of acting upon the political class, characterized as a repertoire of action qualified as juridical mainly through the antipolitical bias. Those are semi-antipolitical ascensions as they are dependent on politics to be understood and executed and yet defined in its opposition. In those terms, the objective is to contribute to our knowledge of how the group that leads the third power of the republic, the judiciary, as well as about the threshold in between law and politics.