Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The main objective is to present, based on the Shakespearean play Measure for Measure and the hermeneutical observations of Cesare Beccaria, the necessity of rethinking the role of the court in the criminal procedure. In order to do so, a qualitative research was adopted, as well as a bibliographical-documentary analysis, insofar as it dealt with scientific articles and doctrinal texts, as well as legislative documents and judicial decisions, using the deductive method. The undeniable contribution of Literature to the Juridical Science was thus made, as it makes possible a strong critical subversion, besides portraying cultures and also working with interpretation. In this sense, after the synthesis of the Shakespearean plot, two models of judgments, objectivist and subjectivist, were visualized, which facilitates the debate about the magistrate’s role in the criminal process. This same logic was applied by Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments, in which the author dismissed any kind of judicial voluntarism, and attributed to the judge the obedient execution of the written Law. Thus, it was found that, since the constitutional reading of the criminal process is intrinsic to democracy, it is incumbent upon the magistrate to construct and maintain the process as a space for effecting guarantees and rights of the accused, so as to be a true spectator. Finally, the excessive emphasis on court decision results in a real disassociation with the accusatory system, as, by ignoring the semantic limits of the legal text, except in the case of constitutionality / conventionality control or in favor of the defendant, it performs a vulgar arbitration, which undermines the constitutional instrumentality.

In the Greek mythology, the god Kronos swallowed his children after birth, in order not to be dethroned and thus to perpetuate himself in power. The Brazilian State, when represented by the Judiciary, in seeking ways to provide access to qualified justice, has been overusing extrajudicial forms – which at community level have provided differentiated approaches to conflict – but such overuse has transformed these extrajudicial decisions into rules of traditional jurisdiction. The present study aims at analyzing the perspective of the Judiciary at implementing alternatives to adjudicated decisions, by means of editing norms that keep it as a centralizing entity, through self-determined means outlined under its order. The research is based on the bibliographical method and contains an examination of the doctrine and legislation connected to the theme, as well as the hypothetical-deductive approach and monographic procedure method. In this understanding, one wonders: from the myth of the Greek god Kronos, is it possible to identify an excess – by the Judiciary – in subtracting consensual ways of resolving conflicts in order to retain the monopoly of jurisdiction? The incessant intervention of the Brazilian Judiciary is incontestable in covering all the questions related to the delineation of the self-composition of conflicts, infecting them with the perils of a decadent system, hence separating the citizen from the access to justice.

The suppression of the moral and juridical status of the woman is discussed hereby, as an extension of the process of depersonification of the human being in the work The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Offred’s story unfolds in a dystopian future where women are the main victims of a new political order. In a United States transformed into the Gilead dictatorship, in the face of eventual loss of fertility by the female population, women are divided into castes and practically lose their rights over themselves, becoming the property of men. Personalization means more than observing rights to the biological being, it is a dialectical process in which individuality and rationality flirt with the inscription of moral importance. This process, being built in the instances of practical philosophy, is prior to the definitions of Law, characterizing itself as a moral construct. Personally, the human being happens to be accepted as the impregnable subject of the Law, which has precisely in the entity of the person its nucleus and the very meaning of its existence. This essay works with the idea of person as a complex being, as in the works by Immanuel Kant (1785), Lucien Sève (1994), Raquel Hogemann (2015) and Oswaldo Pereira de Lima Junior (2017).

The present study analyzes polyamorous relationships and their implications for Law. Different loving and affective practices exist, some of them are sometimes experienced by multiple people at the same time, which breaks with the traditional idea of monogamy as the only relationship identity that is able to constitute families. This occurs, on the one hand, due to largely accepted social and cultural values. On the other hand, the phenomenon of monogamy is further strengthened because the State grants protection mainly to traditional forms of family. However, society begins to resignify such unions, which puts into question the traditional legislation. From the methodological point of view, this research has a qualitative character, with bibliographical and documentary sources, based mainly on the Brazilian film Eu tu eles as reference. On the theoretical level, the paper is based on arguments from the Brazilian  Constitutional Civil Law. Based on the material analyzed, it is concluded that there is an effective possibility of extending family rights to new arrangements, the main reason being to consider affectivity as the norm, since monogamy is only a historically established value in Brazilian society.

This paper proposes an analysis of the legal aspects present in the narrative of The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel by Margaret Atwood. First published in 1985, and heavily influenced by second-wave feminism, The Handmaid’s Tale addresses, mainly, the matter of gender inequality, once it creates a reality in which fertile women are compelled to reproduce through a servitude system. Through a rupture with the Cartesian dichotomy whose dualist notion separates objectivity from subjectivity, reason from emotion, this paper exposes that this oppression is not a literary creation by Atwood, but a reproduction of the power relations put forward in the history of humankind. In this regard, it is explored how Literature can aid the Law in facing the questions that come up in the resolution of legal and social problems. Besides gender inequality, it is possible to spot in the novel several violations concerning the principle of human dignity. Therefore, this research analyzes the legal provisions taken in the fictional space of Gilead, as well as in the country that preceded it, the United States of America, as well as in Brazil. In addition, it studies the symbolic violence to which women are submitted in Gilead and how it relates to the experiences lived by contemporary Brazilian women.

In this article some examples of the relations between art and law are presented, aiming at analyzing how some expressions go beyond the aesthetic ends to relate to collective processes of protest and construction of memory. In the end, reflections are offered on the challenges that arise for States in fulfilling their obligations of symbolic reparation and the possibility of doing so through artistic expressions, such as sculptures.

The law and literature movement, started in 1973 in the United States with the release of The Legal Imagination, by James Boyd White, had as its main objective to reach the humanization of jurists. Although it caught the attention of several authors and spread to different countries, the initial stage of the movement, also known as law in literature, was not immune to criticism. Thus, this article, via bibliographic research, aims at presenting the criticism by Richard Posner, who mainly questions the premise that literature can humanize the jurist. Also, this paper analyzes the production by Robert Weisberg, who sees in the area an overly-romanticized view of literature. Knowing such criticism is crucial to think about the past, present and future of the movement, searching for the right answers it demands.