Legalidade e autoritarismo: o papel dos juristas na consolidação da Ditadura Militar de 1964

Abstract

No authoritarian regime survives without legal instruments that are capable of organising the application of their acts of exception. Even though the military regime in Brazil was constituted through a civil-military coup d’état that overthrew the President João Goulart, the generals that took office never abandoned the idea of making the authoritarian regime look like a state under the rule of law during the twenty-one years of dictatorship. Its most loyal jurists always provided this very specific kind of “legal mask”. Such an authoritarian experience calls for an analysis of the role of the legal scholars in the construction of normative instruments that legitimate violence and intolerance. The dictatorship jurists took over the role of organising a new form of legal theory, free of many principles that conduct a state under the rule of law, such as the limitations of power and the protection of civil, political and social liberties. Instead of a Constitution committed to the very idea of constitutionalism, they helped implementing a Constitution under the doctrine of national security. In order to analyse the relation of Brazilian jurists with the military regime, this thesis defined its focus in four different moments of the legal community. These are the “legislative” roles of those who helped in law making and the acts of exception; the theoretical work of the professors; the judicial activity in the Brazilian Supreme Court; and the ambiguities of the lawyers regarding the State of Exception. This work seeks to demonstrate that during the military regime an authoritarian legal culture influenced most of the Brazilian jurists. It was an instrumentalist view of law, influenced by this authoritarian legal culture, that first authorised the rupture with the 1946 Constitution and inaugurated a new authoritarian-constitutional logic, making it look like the acts of exception of those in power were all under the rule of law. This work also aims to highlight the jurists that actually did not support the dictatorship and publicly condemned the acts of exception. However, despite all the important episodes of resistance within the legal community, it is still possible to affirm that an authoritarian legal culture favoured the connivance of many jurists, contributing to the weakening of the rule of law during the years of military dictatorship. All of the critical analysis in the thesis was developed under the approach of Lenio Streck’s Hermeneutical Critique of Law.