"Legal realisms’ epistemological models and the empirical observation of adjudication".
French legal realism, jurimetrics, Discourse analysis, Writ of Suspension, Federal Supreme Court of Brazil
The generalisation of the use of empirical data in law demands a more careful treatment regarding the theoretical sense and the methodological limitations of empirics focused on courts and judicial decisions. The identification of behavioural trends based on the analysis of a large number of statistical measurements, by revealing hidden dimensions of the functioning of courts, may not give due importance to the justificatory discourse uttered by courts. This thesis asks whether French-Italian legal realism is a viable theoretical alternative for conducting empirical research in law, in the face of the problems of Unites States-based realist empiricism, which ignores or disregards the internal terms of decision-making and judicial reasoning and limits itself to looking at their exterior. The research performs an original empirical analysis of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil in decision concerning writs of suspension and analogous procedural classes. A comparison is ran between the potentialities and mutual blind spots present in the statistical analysis of more than 6 thousand decisions, when faced with a discursive analysis of 50 decisions, all related to judicial discourse over the exceptionality of the use of the procedural instrument and the docket control of appeals against the writs analysed.