DUARTE, C. G. M.; DUARTE, Clara Geysa Marcos.
Résumé:
The Public Defender's Office is provided for in the Federal Constitution of 1988 as a
permanent institution, essential to the jurisdictional function of the State, whose duty is to
ensure the maintenance of the Democratic State of Law; for providing legal assistance
through its judicial, extrajudicial action, in all degrees of jurisdiction, protecting individual or
collective rights; also acting in rights education, and in promoting actions aimed at the
emancipation of social subjects in vulnerable situations. This paper addresses this institution
in order to understand how the Public Defender of the State of Paraíba has performed its
institutional function, constitutionally delineated, regarding the provision of legal assistance
in the area of Family Law at the SousaParaíba
Service Center. A historical analysis will be
carried out on the access to justice and the development of the Public Defender's Office in
Brazil, its principles, objectives and functions, as well as the performance of the State Public
Defender's Office in Paraíba through the analysis of data from the institution in the State and
in the Center of Sousa, with an emphasis on Family Law. The deductive approach method
was used, where, when analyzing the legal provisions, doctrine and jurisprudence related to
the subject, we sought to verify whether legal assistance is effectively provided by the Public
Defender's Office. In the procedure, bibliographic and historicalevolutionary
methods were
used to understand the concept and how the institutionalization of the Public Defender's
Office in Brazil took place. The technique adopted was that of indirect documentation.
Finally, the implementation of the constitutional guarantee of access to legal assistance for the
vulnerable will be empirically verified, based on the analysis of studies related to the Public
Defender's Office in Brazil, in the state of Paraíba, as follows: II Map of State and District
Public Defenders in Brazil and National Survey of the Public Defender's Office, in addition to
the verification of data on assistance in the area of Family Law, carried out in 2019, by the
Public Defender's Office of the State of Paraíba, located in Sousa, according to Reports
extracted from the Public Defender's Office of the State of Paraíba.