Speaker Series: Maria-Fátima Santos

How do legal aid professionals influence penal state administration? Through legal aid professionals’ strategies to mitigate punishment for their clients they may both reduce the harm individual clients face while also contributing to court routines that naturalize the selectivity of penal state practices. I dissect the work of public defenders who counsel poor people facing prosecution for drug trafficking in Brazil’s São Paulo city as a “critical case” to develop this argument. Drawing on multiple sources of data, I elaborate public defenders’ strategies to instigate doubt, contest, or negotiate other court authorities’ interpretations of their client’s case by learning and navigating what I conceptualize as their courtroom’s interpretive terrain. First, my analysis identifies horizontal and vertical dynamics that influence legal aid workers’ strategic decisions. Second, my findings invite greater analytic scrutiny into the conditions and perceptions that influence how and why court cases are resolved either at trial or far before ever making it to that stage. Third, I spotlight the probing of legal aid strategies as a useful analytic method to identify, synthesize, and compare the forces that shape penal court processes and outcomes in different contexts. I conclude with the study’s contributions to research on punishment and inequality, law-in-action, and state power.

Professor Santos’s current research examines public defenders who counsel poor people in Brazil’s penal courts to clarify key dynamics that shape legal aid professions in different contexts, including their relationship to inequality, racialized violence and state transformation. In other work, Fátima examines how carceral administration connects to dynamics of social conflict and political legitimacy.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.