The Public Defender’s Office Has No Identity: An Essay on the Ambiguity, Its Effect of Uncertainty and the Stabilizing Meaning of Discourses and Practices in a Juridical-Political Institution

In this article, I propose a reflection on the distance between the factual possibilities of the Public Defender’s Office and the normative beliefs manifested in the speeches of its operators. I monitored daily life and interviewed public defenders from the states of Rio de Janeiro and Bahia between the years 2020 and 2022. I noticed that they express clarity about the distance between their concrete activity and the egalitarian goal intended for their office by the 1988 Constitutional of the Federal Republic of Brazil and, although resolving this distance is stated as a common concern, that normative goal is affirmed as the factual reality of the institution by everyone interviewed. Moreover, I realized that neither the awareness of the distance nor the desire to resolve it finds concrete translation. Hence, I questioned the nature of the actors’ behavior ambiguity and its role in the reproduction of an institution that is normatively egalitarian but exists in a social and institutional environment that is hierarchal. My objective was to investigate to what extent stating a constitutional expectation that is not practiced places the Public Defender’s Office as a stability source for the action of an unjust “justice system”, both for the institutional scope and for society.