Em nome da "boa administração da justiça": a relação entre governo provincial e os juízes de paz na província de Minas Gerais (1827-1834)

Abstract

With the process of Independence of Brazil of Portugal, the challenge was launched of constructing of the "mosaic" that constituted Portuguese America as a State and Nation, endowed with nexus and cohesion was launched. In the face of this scenario, centrality was gained in the midst of the political debates during the period, the restructuring of the administrative architecture, until then essentially local - in which the Câmara Municipais held the centrality- implying in a progressive process of regionalization of power, that had their first delineated features in 1823, with the law that gave form to the provincial governments (composed of a provincial president and the Conselho de Governo) and also with the installation of the Conselho Geral de Província in 1828. It was also at the moment of the construction of this "new "Empire that triggered systematic criticism of the judiciary of the colonial period. In this time when a new conception of the juridical sphere was created, articulated to the debate on separation of powers and independence of the judiciary, culminating in the creation of the judges of peace, in 1827, judges of first instance, lay and of elective character that, have been seen by historiography as independent in their performance and unrelated to the authority of the provincial government. In the search of articulating those two levels, that is, the process of regionalization of power - concentrating our attention on the provincial government (president of the province in Council) - and the performance of the Judiciary of peace in the province of Minas Gerais, we seek to understand the relations established between government and justice in the years that followed Independence, as well as to point out the possibility of interference of the provincial government in the justice of peace. With this we intend to demonstrate the configuration assumed by the idea of the independence of the judiciary in this scenario, as well as the permanence in the constitutional world of a linking between government and justice.