This article aims to carry out a sociological survey of the Brazilian legal field
in the 1990s. To this end, the relationship between the diversification of the legal
sphere and the legitimisation of definitions of the Law in Brazil over the course of
the 1990s were investigated. The close match between the differentiation of the
teaching of the Law, as a place for producing definitions of legal problems, and the
mobilization of certain uses of the legal profession and of the careers of State
during this period was analysed. This relationship allows one to gather the emergence
of the academic career as a space for the production of specific conceptions
and uses of the Law. This process is intimately linked to the repositioning of jurists
in the sphere of power in Brazil, after the changes in the country’s political
landscape that have their institutional expression in the promulgation of the 1988
Constitution.