Pragmatic Analysis of the Jurisdictional Final Decisions of the Alagoas State Court of Justice in Processes of Habeas Corpus: Methodological Choices and Resource Material

Abstract

There exist lots of criticisms considering law research in Brazil, and an alternative way to produce innovation is to resort to empirical approaches. A previous research carried out by the authors aimed to examine the decisions taken in processes of habeas corpus by Alagoas State Court of Justice with the purpose of measuring the influence of the theory of garantismo (protection of all liberties and fundamental rights) of Luigi Ferrajoli in criminal decisions. We used pragmatism as a method, so that a jurisdictional decision was focused as one of the most important dimensions of our research while theoretical categories played the role of a support. This article describes methodological choices, and means of collecting data through the study of fifty-nine decisions taken from 2008 to 2012. It ended with the analysis of those judgements verifying to which extent Ferrajoli’s definition of liberties and fundamental rights has influenced on the decisions made by the Criminal Justice Court of Alagoas.