"Only the people can build a culture of law," says José Geraldo de Sousa Jr.

247 - In an interview with the series Democracy and Law, coordinated by Alfredo Attié in partnership between the Paulista Academy of Law (APD) and Brasil 247, the jurist and professor José Geraldo de Sousa Jr., former rector of the University of Brasília and coordinator of the project Law Found in the StreetHe defended legal pluralism as a path to building a truly democratic law. For him, it is in the streets, a social and political space, that the law reveals itself as a concrete expression of the people's struggles for dignity and emancipation.

Throughout the conversation, José Geraldo revisited the philosophical and historical foundations that structure his critique of the dominant conception of law. “The legal is not legislation. The legal is the emergence of justice extracted from the legitimate conditions of emancipation,” he stated. Based on this understanding, law is not a monopoly of courts, universities, or legislators, but arises from the political practice of collective subjects. “Only the people can build the culture of law,” he declared, contrasting this view with the logic of centralized codification and the monopoly of institutionalized legal knowledge.

A disciple of Roberto Lyra Filho, José Geraldo explained how the project Law Found in the Street It was born from an epistemological inversion, inspired by Marx and the poem he wrote when he was young: "I, for my part, try to see without distorting bias what I could find right in the middle of the street." For him, the street is more than a physical space: it is the place of the event, where the people transform themselves into political subjects. "The street is the space where social relationships are built and horizons of negotiation are drawn," he stated.

The interview also highlighted how this process is expressed in popular struggles for rights. José Geraldo mentioned the recognition of housing as a constitutional right, which originated in urban mobilizations and the actions of social movements. “I don’t have a house, so I want to live somewhere. This transforms into a demand for the right to housing,” he explained. The same occurs with issues such as food sovereignty, the right to the city, and the recognition of collective identities, such as indigenous people, quilombola communities, women, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and workers.

He also recalled how legal pluralism allows for the recognition of the validity of different forms of normative and legal production, stemming from diverse matrices of Western experience. “In the same social space, many rights are in effect. They are junctions of existence, modes of production of life that obey distinct references. One does not subordinate the other,” he stated, citing Justice Edson Fachin's vote in the judgment on the temporal framework.

In defending a right committed to social justice, José Geraldo reiterated the centrality of struggles for emancipation in the production of law. "In the present, what we have to do is wrest from bourgeois law the right that we already see as the horizon of our struggle for emancipation," he said, evoking Marx. For him, the Law Found in the Street It is, above all, a political pedagogy: “Democracy is the pedagogy of humanization. It opens the perspective of the emergence of our possibility of achieving everything within us that is an absolutely open horizon.” Watch: