Definitions of legal, technical, and domain-specific terms used throughout Juca and the sens.legal ecosystem.
| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Acordao | Appellate court decision — the primary document type in Juca’s corpus. Each acordao has an ementa (summary), tese (thesis), and full text (integra). |
| Dispositivo Legal | A specific legal provision or article from legislation (e.g., Art. 927 do Codigo Civil). |
| Ementa | Summary or headnote of a court decision. Used as the primary search field in Juca’s hybrid search. |
| Integra | Full text of a court decision. Accessed via SlideOver panel or exported to PDF. |
| IRAC | Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion — a structured legal analysis framework used by the Ratio tool for extraction. |
| Jurisprudencia | Case law — the body of court decisions that forms binding or persuasive precedent. |
| Ministro | Minister (judge) of the STJ. Juca tracks which ministro authored each decision for divergence analysis. |
| Parecer | Formal legal opinion — one of the 4 delivery modes in the Briefing Progressivo. |
| Precedente | A previous court decision used as authority to support a legal argument. |
| Ratio Decidendi | The core legal reasoning or principle behind a decision — what makes it a precedent. |
| STJ | Superior Tribunal de Justica — Brazil’s highest court for non-constitutional federal matters. Juca’s corpus contains 23,400+ STJ decisions. |
| Sumula | Binding summary of consolidated jurisprudence issued by the STJ. Validated by Juca’s anti-hallucination system. |
| Tese | Legal thesis or argument extracted from a decision. Searchable field in Juca’s search engine. |
| Turma | Division or panel of the STJ that decided a case (e.g., 1a Turma, 2a Turma). |
| Term | Definition |
|---|
| Block | Typed UI content unit — the fundamental building block of Juca’s interface. 11 types: message, progress, diagnosis, action_prompt, precedent, precedent_picker, summary, risk_balance, chart, delivery, exit_card. |
| Block Factory | Pure functions that create typed block data with defaults. Located in src/lib/blocks/types.ts (e.g., createDiagnosisData(), createRiskBalanceData()). |
| Briefing Progressivo | Juca’s 4-phase progressive disclosure system: Diagnosis → Precedents → Risks → Delivery. Each phase reveals information incrementally based on user interaction. |
| Composer | Input component where users type queries and submit them. Supports tool hints and pipeline mode selection. |
| G,C,R Pipeline | Generate → Criticize → Revise — Juca’s multi-LLM processing pattern where a generator creates content, critics evaluate it, and a revisor produces the final output. |
| Hub | Juca’s architectural role: a lightweight frontend that orchestrates backend agents (Valter, Leci) rather than processing data locally. |
| Liquid Legal | The design language for Juca’s UI. Palette: bg-paper (#F0F0EE), ink-primary (#1A161F), accent (#FFF06D). |
| PhaseRail | Visual navigation component showing briefing phase progress (4 phases as a vertical rail). |
| SlideOver | Sliding panel for viewing full decision text (integra) without leaving the current context. |
| Tool Registry | Pattern that routes user intents to specialized handler tools. 5 tools registered with priority-based selection: analyzer (9), juris (8), ratio (7), compare (5), insights (4). |
| WorkCanvas | Main content area that renders blocks in sequence. The primary viewport of the Unified Home interface. |
| Term | Definition |
|---|
| sens.legal | The parent platform encompassing Juca, Valter, and Leci — an AI-powered legal analysis ecosystem. |
| Valter | Backend agent for STJ jurisprudence. Python/FastAPI service with 23,400+ decisions, 28 MCP tools, BM25 + semantic search, Neo4j knowledge graph, and multi-LLM pipeline. Production URL: https://valter-api-production.up.railway.app. |
| Leci | Backend agent for federal legislation. TypeScript/Next.js with Drizzle ORM. Currently in early development (v0.1-pre) with database schema ready but no public API yet. |
| MCP | Model Context Protocol — standardized interface for AI tool interaction. Valter exposes 28 MCP tools for search, verification, graph analysis, and ingestion. |
| Adapter Layer | Planned abstraction (v0.3) that provides a unified interface for Juca to communicate with any backend agent (Valter, Leci, future agents). |
