Law and legality in Mexico City: State and Law as social practice. A juzgado cívico in Mexico, D.F.

In dialogue with a debate that questions the strength of the rule of law and the place of legal order in the construction of a democratic regime, this research analyzes the foundation and operation of the Civic Culture Law of Mexico City. The Civic Culture Law is a law that, since 2004, regulates the use of public space (practices, activities, behaviors) in Mexico City, while the juzgado cívico is the institution in which the reconciliations, responsibilities, infractions and punishments of the offenders of this law are processed and determined. Based on fieldwork in a juzgado cívico in Mexico City\'s Historic Center, I explore the historical and political configurations that have made of this space a zone between boundaries of legality between the legal, the illegal and the informal in a dense web of social relationships and commercial circuits. Therefore, based on practices and situated contexts, in a perspective of anthropology of the State, I study the everyday use of the Civic Culture Law in the juzgados cívicos. Regarding these uses, I analyze with particular attention the circuits, practices and mechanisms that enable the production of a legal truth that differs from the empirical record. To analyze these practices and productions within the legal field, I propose the concept of legalism. Finally, I consider the place of arbitrariness and discretion in the Civic Culture Law as part of an administrative law that spreads, throughout the city streets, a particular police power, a power that, in the name of the law, often suspends the laws legal principles. (AU)