[The nursing process and the law of professional exercise].

The necessity of the cientificity in the nursing's working process, pushed by the science's advance and enclosure in the job market, configured itself in the establishment of nursing's process. The purpose of this study was to analyze in the nursing's legal documents, the nurse's duty opposite the Brazilian society, in the perspective of the scientific methodology in the working process. In a historic approach, the laws and designation-laws that normalized the nursing usage in the period that the nursing process was being introduced in Brazil.