Tradition and diversification in the uses and definitions of the law: a proposed analysis

this article aims to carry out a sociological survey of the brazilian legal field in the 1990s. to this end, the relationship between the diversification of the legal sphere and the legitimisation of definitions of the law in brazil over the course of the 1990s were investigated. the close match between the differentiation of the teaching of the law, as a place for producing definitions of legal problems, and the mobilization of certain uses of the legal profession and of the careers of state during this period was analysed. this relationship allows one to gather the emergence of the academic career as a space for the production of specific conceptions and uses of the law. this process is intimately linked to the repositioning of jurists in the sphere of power in brazil, after the changes in the country's political landscape that have their institutional expression in the promulgation of the 1988 constitution.