This article proposes strategies for research that contributes to a Sociology of Judiciary Elites. For these purposes, it advocates the need to articulate research that identifies the professed values of juridical agents and analyzes the institutions within which these agents are socialized while going on to study their decisions. The first part of this article, we present results of a questionnaire that we applied to Paraná State (Tribunal de Justiça do Paraná) court judges, during the year 2006, regarding their juridical values. The second part makes some considerations on the need to study our interviewees' exogenous and endogenous socialization processes, in order to be able to understand some of responses we analyzed in the previous section. Finally, we advocate the need for behavioral study of these agents through qualitative and quantitative study of their decisions. The article does not intend to offer definitive conclusions, given the still preliminary nature of some of our research.
judiciary elite; Tribunal de Justiça do Paraná; juridical values
