When it completed 15 years of existence, a group of professors of the course from activities carried out jointly within the scope of the undergraduate course in law; the experience accumulated in teaching, research and extension activities at FUMEC itself and at its institutions of origin (notably UFMG and PUC-MG); and of already consolidated academic production; presented to Capes the project for the implementation of the Stricto Sensu Graduate Course (Master’s Degree) in Law, object of this report. After its approval in 2009, the Graduate Program in Law at FUMEC University (PPGD) began its activities in 2010, having received its first evaluation in 2013.
In these four years of existence, its main concern has been to consolidate itself and, in this context, it has sought, especially:
Strengthen the internal administrative structures, materials and equipment necessary for the development of its activities;
To present itself, in the educational sphere, as an option for training at the master’s level in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte and other hub cities in the State of Minas Gerais; to form and implement research projects aimed at the integration between professors and students of the course;
Offer disciplines consistent with the projects and profiles of the students who entered the course; Seek social and institutional partnerships at the national and international level to strengthen the course;
Integrate the faculty, students and administrative staff in the PPGD and Undergraduate Programs; consolidate itself as an innovative and excellent course.
These initial activities were accompanied by numerous other tasks that were and are part of the processes of implementation and development of the course.
From a geographical point of view, the course offered by FUMEC University in Belo Horizonte is part of the third largest urban agglomeration in the country with an estimated population, by IBGE (Jul. 2014), of approximately 5.7 million inhabitants.
As if the population directly affected by the course in the Metropolitan Region of Belo Horizonte (RMBH) were not enough, the capital, occupying a central geographical position in the State of Minas Gerais, is able to attract students from all over the State who seek to deepen and improve their academic training in the legal area.
According to CAPES data from 2014, Minas Gerais has 9 Graduate Programs in Law, 5 of which are located in the capital and 4 in the countryside. The data, therefore, demonstrate that the geographical position of the course allows it to serve not only students from the RMBH but also from the entire state.
It is worth remembering the growing demand for legal training at the master’s level, since, according to data from the publication OAB Recomenda (2012) […] Brazil is training 87,523 legal professionals per year, which means 243 per day, that is, 10 new bachelors in Law appear every hour.
Moreover, it is important to remember that it is still necessary to expand training at the srictu sensu level so that undergraduate courses in Law are able to meet the requirements of the Ministry of Education in relation to teacher training.
On the other hand, Minas Gerais is a federative unit in which an industrial complex and a huge number of units providing various public and private services are located. It is a State that maintains internal business and business relationships, as well as with the rest of Brazil and with much of the world.
It has also been historically notable for being a state of great talents in the public area and in the political sphere, being the state of the federation with the largest number of municipalities (853), in addition to several administrative regions, with numerous regional disparities.
Such circumstances create a regional and national demand for study centers in the areas of regulation and legal strategies and the development of research on the limits of State action and the relativity of the principle of autonomy of will, as well as on issues of complementarity between the public and private spheres.
The social and metropolitan framework described shows the order of problems that can be glimpsed for discussion and treatment in the proposal for a master’s course in Law that FUMEC University develops.
The Program is structured around the area of Social Institutions, Law and Democracy and the lines of research Private Autonomy, Regulation and Strategy (Private Law) and Public Sphere, Legitimacy and Control (Public Law), having received praise from the CAPES evaluation committee, in the last triennium (2010/2012), within the scope of the course proposal.
As for the insertion of the Program in the field of law and the subareas of public law and private law, these are due both to its geographical location, as explained above, and to the Program’s own proposal to work on the fields of intersection between the spheres and public and private law.
This circumstance creates the need for legal professionals to specialize in order to present conditions to analyze the interference that state power has in private autonomy, identify the possibilities of limiting this interference, as well as propose reformulations in relation to the role and performance of the state and the private sector.
In addition, these relationships create legal problems of all kinds, at the local, regional and national levels, and all of them must be solved with the participation of jurists who are able to analyze and apply the foundations of the Democratic Rule of Law or another model of State, if that is the conclusion of the proposed research.
The program’s proposal is, in fact, in the subareas of public and private law and its main challenge is precisely to create a teaching and research environment that promotes interdisciplinarity and the construction of knowledge in the areas of interference in the context of the historical summa divisio of legal thought.
The history of the course, therefore, in spite of its recent implementation, allows it to be presented as innovative in this search for the construction of knowledge in the frontier areas – which problematizes, to a certain extent, the very division of areas and sub-areas of knowledge in the field of law. In 2017, the quadrennial evaluation of CAPES raised the grade of the course to 4 (four), which reinforces the ascending profile of the Program and the quality of academic production.
