The sacred and the profane in the Brazilian trial by jury

Abstract

This article was specially made for a discipline called Special Topics: Sociological Studies of Religion, studied for a Master´s degree in Sociology at Universidade Federal de Sergipe (UFS), Núcleo de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Ciências Sociais (NPPCS). The aim of the article is to discuss the institutional position of the jury as a locus in which, besides its secular appearance, we find, in the context of an indispensable ritual to affirm the link between society and justice; the dialectics between the sacred and the profane. In doing this, we are not only showing how the trial by jury is organized and executed from the point of view of the sociological theory of religion, but also revealing what makes of this sociopolitical institution one of the few examples of institutional stability in Brazilian history.