Comparisons, syntheses and extensions: the jurisprudence of the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice as digital metadata

Abstract

This article contributes to the debates about the concepts of access and democratization of the justice system through attention to technical-bureaucratic circuits still little inspected by the anthropology interested in law: those that, after the sentences have been promulgated, are in charge of their organization and disclosure in digital search engines. By examining institutional documents from the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), I describe jurisprudence not as the direct result of judgments by superior courts but as the product of complex technical-documentary work carried out by human analysts and computational applications, which uses comparisons, syntheses and extensions of documents housed in a voluminous database. I demonstrate how the management of this database and the making of “digital representations” of the enacted sentences are intricate with the concept of standardization, central to the Court activities. Finally, I argue that the democratic appeal of the STJ, despite the numerous barriers restricting its entrances, is contemporarily anchored in the careful availability of its statements to all users who have access to the internet.

Keywords:
Jurisprudence; Access; Data base; Superior Court of Justice; Big data