The democratic character (?) of public hearings in the Federal Supreme Court

The research was devoted to examining the institute of public hearings held at the Federal Supreme Court (STF) in order to assess the institute's capacity, as it is disciplined and applied, to meet its objectives of democratizing constitutional hermeneutics and to legitimize judicial decisions made after its implementation. In order to do so, it relied on Harbele's (1997) theory of open interpretation of constitutions as a support for the development of methodological strategies, which included a review of the literature available in the country on the subject, the study of four experiences of public hearings carried out in the STF for the production of direct sources, the use of data raised by other similar studies already carried out in the country to identify the main problems that afflict the institute's practice in Brazil and the formulation of proposals for overcoming them. From the research conducted using the deductive and inductive methods, it was possible to propose the broad reformulation of the institute, so that it becomes organized in the form of a public debate that truly guarantees the participation of various civil society specters, in a way allow the confrontation between diverse arguments and the effective possibility of meeting a legal solution that is closer to the claim of correction.