Images of justice: Contributions to rethinking the curriculum and legal pedagogy

This paper aims to discuss data from an ongoing research which seeks to analyze the images of Justice among freshmen and senior students from two Law courses of two public universities, one in Angola and the other in Brazil, as database for further investigations on the curriculum and Legal Pedagogy. The teaching of Law in these two countries, which share common features, such as the Portuguese roots of their respective legal systems and similarities as to the crisis identified in the pedagogical field connected to the teaching of law. In this respect, the development of studies which can provide the necessary conditions for legal education to shorten the distance from social reality and qualified professional education, as well as contribute to a fairer social order by expanding justice access, are a challenge to research work. The use and recognition of the relevance of image analysis in qualitative research methods in the social sciences area are relatively recent. The text is based mainly on theoretical contributions of Ralf Bohnsack, who proposes a documentary method of interpretation, originally inspired by Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge, so as to allow the analysis of the particularity of images as opposed to the text. The comparative analysis of the images of justice between freshmen and senior students contributes to rethinking course curriculum and legal pedagogy.