The phenomenon of Judicialization: a public controversy of the Covid-19 pandemic in the states of Bahia, Maranhão and Rio Grande do Norte
Covid-19; Judicialization; Controversy; Pragmatism; State.
The new coronavirus spread in early 2020, breaking the Chinese border and advancing among all countries in the world, making the World Health Organization (WHO) declare a pandemic state. Due to the advance of the pandemic, the governors of Brazilian states took strict isolation measures in order to prevent its spread, which generated strong controversies between the Federal Union and other federated entities. This study aims to analyze the phenomenon of Judicialization caused by the controversy of federal entities in the states of Bahia, Maranhão and Rio Grande do Norte, which started in the beginning of 2020 until the current moment. In spite of our theoretical problematization, the controversy understood as a specific genre of a conflict is designed by the conflicting positions taken by federated entities and for this we ask ourselves: to what extent this Covid-19 public controversy can be understood from the category of judicialization formulated by Jürgen Habermas and Marcelo Neves? To answer our problem, we use as main theoretical contributions the theory of communicative action by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas; also the perspective of legal sociology of the Brazilian and jurist Marcelo Neves to understand their categories of judicialization in the two aforementioned authors. As for the justice and justification categories, we will use the pragmatic sociology of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot and other actors who connected with the present approaches. Finally, in order to be practical, we will use a qualitative approach to analyze the public controversy between federated entities, in addition to the use of hermeneutics; historiography and an ethnography of the Federal Supreme Court's constitutional review documents.