By Sara R. Munhoz
Author of
A Paixão do Acesso: uma etnografia das ferramentas digitais e da jurisprudência do Superior Tribunal de Justiça [The Passion of Access: An Ethnography of Digital Tools and the Jurisprudence of the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice]. São Paulo: Hucitec Editora (2024).
Imagine that your husband—your partner of two decades— has died. While you struggle with your grief, you must also deal with legal processes. When you try to claim your survivor’s pension—legally guaranteed to you as your husband’s widow—you discover that someone else beat you to it. Someone else claimed to be your husband’s widow. You didn’t know about her; she didn’t know about you. For many years, though, the two of you shared a man you each believed to be yours alone—not only emotionally, but for all legal purposes. What should be done?
You both demand justice. One claims to be the legally recognized wife, with notarial proof. The other appeals to the concept of a socio-affective stable union, which should carry the same weight as marriage under Brazilian law. As the case moves through the justice system, fundamental questions emerge: What is a family? How can it be defined, understood, and proven? What are the necessary and sufficient criteria to generate legal effects, such as inheritance or asset division? Finally, can the legal system recognize simultaneous or parallel families?
A Paixão do Acesso (The Passion of Access) focuses on how the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice (STJ), one of the country’s most important courts and the final authority on legislation below constitutional level, addresses such questions. The STJ’s interpretations, or ‘jurisprudence,’ play a critical role in shaping the national justice system. Over the past decade, various legislative and administrative initiatives have sought to ensure that the STJ’s rulings decisively influence lower courts, aiming to make Brazilian justice more predictable, efficient, uniform—and, therefore, more democratic.
Based on documentary research, I argue that the STJ must effectively publicize its decisions to achieve those goals, a task currently carried out exclusively through digital platforms, such as its official website and the search engines it hosts. A Paixão do Acesso examines how changes in STJ’s strategies to disseminate case law have also transformed its production and implementation of the law in ways that directly impact the lives of Brazilians.
Between the 1990s and 2000s, the Secretariat relied on staff to handle files and conduct case law research for those who requested it. Initially, this work was done through in-person visits to Brasília; later, the same processes moved to phone, fax, or email. These technological changes profoundly transformed access, making it faster and more convenient to view documents. At the same time, digitalization eliminated direct interaction with specialists who curated the STJ’s archives, significantly transforming the relationship between the court and the society through digital tools. The Jurisprudence Secretariat simultaneously became closer to and further removed from users, and found itself obliged to anticipate and predict what they might seek. It then collaborated with machines to make these anticipated demands accessible.
Today, anyone who wants to understand the STJ’s rulings—including the court’s own ministers—must be proficient in using digital tools. For instance, to determine whether parallel or simultaneous families can be legally recognized, ministers must rely on these tools. Likewise, judges, lawyers, and citizens need to navigate an increasingly automated search engine to understand how families are defined under Brazilian law.
A Paixão do Acesso reveals how these tools are created by examining the processes of organizing, filtering, and classifying legal decisions that they have been tasked with performing. The book explores the relationship between the humans and the machines involved in the technical work of synthesizing vast legal archives and highlighting what is deemed relevant for standardizing jurisprudence. The book details applications, systems, and artificial intelligence tools designed to expedite justice by deciding what can be grouped and hidden versus what deserves prominence and recommendation.
As A Paixão do Acesso makes clear, understanding how the law is practiced requires attention not only to judicial procedures but also to the machines and human workers shaping the courts’ bureaucratic operations. Going further, the book shows that citizen-state relations, and citizenship itself, are both altered with the advent of digital platforms. In the end, the digital recommendation system at the heart of Brazil’s democratic state is far more than a new technology, or a new way to access the same information: it is renewed, yet controversial, way of making justice possible.[1] The book is available in a printed Portuguese version.
Sara R. Munhoz received her PhD from the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar). Her research on the Superior Court of Justice (STJ) resulted in the book A Paixão do Acesso, published by Hucitec. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow funded by FAPESP (São Paulo Research Foundation) in the Department of Scientific and Technological Policy at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and a visiting researcher at University College London (UCL), where she works on themes related to justice, democracy, and digital technologies.
Notes
[1] The research is the result of my doctoral thesis in Social Anthropology defended in the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar), under the supervision of Jorge Mattar Villela. It was granted by FAPESP (process number 2017/02467-4), to whom I am grateful.