Working in Virtual Places: The Transformation of Legal Aid in São Paulo City

• In Event: Crime, Law and Deviance Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 2: Technology and the Criminal Justice System

Abstract

Courts that process people facing prosecution or punishment have historically been resistant to conducting procedures using virtual technologies. However, in 2020 the global health crisis demanded that courts across the world move most work from the physical to virtual realm. For some districts, this was mostly an emergency measure. In others, the virtual domain has since become the primary environment within which court actors now work, including in the city of São Paulo—Latin America’s largest metropolis. This paper asks: How does virtual space shape the work of legal aid professionals who defend people facing state prosecution? I argue that a distinctive feature of carrying out work interactions virtually is that people’s physical bodies are separated from the place of their work encounter—this influences the conditions under which legal aid professionals execute their work practices and also their modes of exchange with other relevant actors. The analysis draws on multiple sources of data collected over 42 months of fieldwork for a larger study on public defenders in Brazil’s penal courts, including interviews and observations conducted both before and after the virtual domain became an integral place of court work in São Paulo. Through analysis of public defender practices and perspectives in this case, I demonstrate how conducting work virtually influences client advocacy, rapport development and professional training in legal aid services. I conclude by elaborating dimensions along which to further advance analyses of how virtual places mediate court work, professions and processes.

Author

• Maria-Fátima Santos, University of Wisconsin-Madison