This work aims at systematizing the theoretical references used in a study on legal elites and the politics of justice in Brazil. Facing methodological problems brought by empirical research, the article aims at presenting the relations between the sociology of elites, the sociology of legal professions and the political science's institutional analysis on the judicial system, in a way of identifying and analyzing legal elites and their political action in the high administration and in the reform of the Brazilian judicial system. It was possible to establish relations between those theoretical references by facing the conceptions of judicial system and legal field. After reviewing those different theoretical traditions' literature and illustrating the methodological problems by selected sets of data, we can conclude that the notion of legal field is useful as a theoretical framework to understand the institutional, professional and social distinctions and hierarchies which produce elites of judicial politics in Brazil.
legal elites; judicial politics; judicial system; legal field; judicial reforms
