Practical aspects of empirical legal studies: a discussion based on an ethnography of a trial by jury in Brazil

This paper discusses the practical aspects of performing empirical research in judicial institutions, based on my ethnography on the trial by jury in the city of Juiz de Fora/MG. First, I explain how I chose the object of study and formulated the research questions. Next, I present my fieldwork, showing what guided me and in which direction. In this part, I describe the main obstacles found during the course of this research. Thereafter, I comment on how the idea to do interviews emerged, how I performed them, which problems I needed to solve and how I treated such data. Thus, I propose to discuss the empirical research not by its results but based on the process by which it was socially constructed.