The practical utility of Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory in socio-legal research

Resumen

The purpose of this text is to offer a proposal for the use of the concepts included in French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory in the field of socio-legal research. Bourdieu defines such notions as habitus (schemes of interpretation), field and capital. To do this, we undertake a succinct review of the concepts and then expose their practical use in an em-pirical research study on the changes in the Mexican legal model, i. e., the transition from an inquisitorial system to an adversarial oral one, concretely in the city of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos. Due to space limitations, we only develop two topics analyzing the practices and the judges: the construction of legal truth and the new and old practices, known as the oral accusatory system.

Keywords:Sociology; Jurist; Interpretation; Law.