Public Defenders of the State of Sao Paulo: Activism and Career Profile

This paper aims to present the main results of a postdoctoral research carried out on the Public Defense Office of the State of São Paulo.This study, which is part of a more extensive project on conflicts in the construction of urban spaces, focuses on how the Public Defense Office acts in this area, mainly working on activism issues among public defenders. We seek to understand the activism of these professionals from their own perspective: we try to perceive how they mobilize this category in a context in which they feel strongly encouraged to reinforce the relevance of their professional activity and their social role (the creation of the Public Defense Office is recent and professional conflicts are diverse). Therefore, activism is pertinent among these professionals since they understand that their activity is built in opposition to other legal careers and their performance would also be much more "humane" (because of the constitutional guarantee of defense of the accused); We also seek to contribute to this contemporary debate studying a topic that has been subject of little research in Brazilian social sciences so far, as it is the case of public defenders in São Paulo. Quantitative and qualitative data will be presented (in their contrasts and complementarities) in order to create a profile of the Public Defense Office of the State of São Paulo and this is relevant, from a sociological point of view, for it allows us to glimpse the results of training and recruitment processes of this particular state agency.The results, so far, point to two types of activism in this field: one related to more professional issues, or, to be more accurate, to the consolidation of that career and another involving a more committed performance of the public defenders, bringing them closer to social movements.