In this paper, we propose to analyze an Acórdão produced within a criminal case filed against a woman accused of committing the crime of self-induced abortion. To this end, we mainly built our analysis on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1996) and their argumentative categories developed in New Rhetoric, and Amossy (2006), who studies argumentative discourse. When starting this analysis, our aim was to understand the research object in its argumentative structure, trying to identify and correlate aspects of the institutional framework that shapes the practice of argumentation in this rendering, the input channels of doxa elements, manifestations of visible discursive heterogeneity, the presence of social representations, construction and circulation of images of oneself and the other in discourse, and stereotyping processes. We concluded that the Acórdão genre is subject to a framework of strong generic and institutional constraints that shape and determine speaking conditions. We also concluded that the Acórdão is a genre composed by voices from the legal field (the standard speech, legal science speech and discourses produced in other Courts), and doxa elements circulating in the social environment. Therefore, there is no neutrality of the judging instances because the judicial members are also subject to shared beliefs, conventional wisdom and circulating stereotypes, like any other subject living in a society at a given time.
Discourse analysis; Legal discourse; Argumentation; Doxa; Social representations
