Muito além das aparências: o design jurídico como instrumento de influência na tomada da decisão judicial

Abstract

Legal design aims to facilitate understanding and simplify legal languages, instruments and procedures with a view to promoting problem solving and improving people's perception of the justice system as a whole. Thus, based on the above construction, the fol-lowing research problem is proposed: how does the legal design applied to petitions and documents influence judicial decision-making? To discuss it, we start with a theoretical analysis of decision-making processes based on what is most recent on the subject: Behavi-oral Economics and its view of the cognitive and behavioral processes that underlie the processes of choices and judgments, the system of heuristics and biases, the Theory of Dual Processing of Thought and the system of nudges related to libertarian paternalism. The ge-neral objective of this study is to analyze the relationship between legal design and the formation of conviction of judgments within the scope of legal proceedings. At first, a theoretical description about the themes of the Theory of Judgment and Decision, behavioral aspects of the judicial decision and its relation with the design, with the outline of bibliographical research. Then, a case study is carried out, to exhaustively study the pieces of some judicial processes, which include: initial petitions presented by the plaintiffs, contestations of the Municipality of Uberlândia, formulated by the author of this work, sentences pronounced by the judgments of the respective jurisdictional bodies and, where applicable, second instance judgments. In order to carry out the study, therefore, the discourse analysis method is used, with the application of the analytical procedures of Behavioral Discourse Analysis, based on the radical behaviorist approach of Skinner's language. The results found indicate that the application of design tools influences the judicially relevant decision-making, by providing an increase in the judges' cognitive comfort. As a contribution, we highlight the possibility of carrying out empirical studies on the influence of design on legal decision-making, and of using the theoretical bases presented here for the implementation of different legal solutions, with a view to improving the Judiciary system as a all.