Brazilian Supreme Court

Neste artigo, mapeamos como a ação de um ministro do STF pode influenciar o processo político decisório. Propomos uma visão ampliada dos mecanismos pelos quais tribunais atuam sobre a dinâmica política, mostrando que, no STF, a alocação desses poderes é individualizada e descentralizada. Neste cenário, que chamamos de “ministrocracia”, a política constitucional se torna errática, criando problemas para a
justificação do poder do tribunal em um regime democrático.  (Revista Novos Estudos CEBRAP, edição 110, v.37, n.1, jan-abr 2018)

Since 2012, same-sex marriage has been legal in Brazil. This, however,
was accomplished without the participation of any political branch: the only lawmaking
actor involved was the Supreme Court. In existing studies on the judicialization
of politics, lawmakers are typically the first movers, while courts function as
actual or potential veto players regarding the outcome of the legislative process.
The Brazilian Supreme Court, however, when provoked by social and political
actors under specific circumstances, has delivered decisions that: (a) established
rules in areas of law where the elected branches had not made any decisions in the
last decades; and (b) at least in how they came to be treated by the Supreme Court
itself, foreclosed further congressional or presidential lawmaking on these topics.
This paper is a case study on the conditions in which this judicial role – of
a first and only legislative chamber – has emerged in Brazil. Although Brazilian
constitutional law includes a couple of mechanisms designed for judicial review of
legislative omissions, it was the Supreme Court’s increasingly expansive reading of
its own powers – not those deliberately designed to allow for judicial legislation –
that created opportunities for social and political movements to bypass Congress
and change the constitutional status quo according to their ideals. This new role of
the Supreme Court, however, creates tension between two different justifications
for judicial intervention in politics – when judges act last, they are constrained by
not having also been the first to decide what the constitution requires and allows for
on a given issue. In same-sex marriage litigation and in several other recent cases,
however, the Brazilian Supreme Court has been trying to have it both ways.

The Brazilian Supreme Court has developed an informal mechanism of timing control: each justice has the power (pedido de vista) to request more time to study the files of a given case. In this article, we use a database of over 1.5 million cases to calculate vista request duration and compare vista behavior to other activities in which caseload and the justice’s efficiency play a role. Our results show that vistas can function as an individual power, unconstrained by the Court’s internal rules of procedure, to indefinitely remove cases from the agenda, in ways that cannot be explained by the Court’s workload. We also find initial evidence of the vistas being used for strategic purposes, when justices wait for a case to be decided in a more favorable composition or political context. These results suggest that comparative analyses of courts should look beyond formal rules of docket control to study informal means of delay.

Resumo: O argumento de autoridade no direito não necessariamente é uma falácia, podendo ser artifício importante para a construção do discurso persuasivo a ser apresentado pelos tribunais. A doutrina jurídica, ainda que não se trate de autoridade institucionalizada, adquire tal caráter à medida que se sedimenta o prestígio de determinados juristas, servindo também para constantemente reconstruir a autoridade dos tribunais. Este artigo trabalhará com tais premissas para apresentar levantamento empírico do argumento de autoridade no Supremo Tribunal Federal entre os anos de 1960 e 2016, procurando analisar os modos pelos quais os cinco autores mais citados do período foram utilizados na fundamentação das decisões. Tal pesquisa foi realizada a partir de software para o levantamento de dados da base do Supremo, posteriormente classificados por indicadores do tipo de argumento de autoridade. Com isso foi possível verificar extenso uso do argumento de autoridade em sentido irracional de maneira geral, sendo a doutrina obter dictum no mais das vezes. Contudo, verificou-se maior frequência de uso racional nas citações a autores de Direito Constitucional, evidenciando maior preocupação com a robustez de argumentos nessa seara.

Palavras-chave: Argumento de autoridade, Doutrina jurídica, Fontes do direito, Retórica, Supremo Tribunal Federal.


Abstract: The argument from authority is not necessarily a fallacy in law, since it may be an important instrument for the construction of a persuasive speech to be presented by courts. Even though legal scholarship does not represent institutionalized authority, it acquires authority as long as the prestige of some jurists grows through time. This paper is going to present, starting from these premises, an empirical research regarding the argument from authority on the Brazilian Supreme Court between 1960 and 2016, in order do analyze the ways by which the five most cited authors have been used as grounds for rulings. This research was made possible by a piece of software that collected information from the Court’s database and then were classified through indicators according to the kind of argument from authority. Therefore, it was possible to observe a very frequent use of arguments from authority in an irrational way, since legal doctrine was mostly presented as obiter dictum. However, there has been a higher frequency of rational arguments from authority on citations to Constitutional Law scholars, hence showing a higher care with legal discourse on this area.

Keywords: Argument from authority, Legal doctrine, Sources of law, Rhetoric, Brazilian Supreme Court.

Has the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) used formal arguments to evade the judgment of conflicts submitted by the concentrated judicial review? Over the past 20 years, the Supreme Court has denied trial to a growing number of cases, citing the presence of formal defects, mainly due to the so-called incidental " lack of grounds": when, owing to the delay in assessing the conflict, alluded legal standard ceases to exist or have effect. This research starts from the Bickel's hypothesis (1962): courts deliberately use passive virtues – self-restriction techniques, usually of procedural nature, which provide the court with the option to avoid the assessment of a case – in order to seek to understand the "lack of grounds" institutional phenomenon. In this sense, data from the Brazilian Supreme Court's on the cases on which the "lack of grounds" was harvested were subjected of statistical inferences, in order to explain, through modeling, this omission behavior of the Court.

this paper intends to approach the
theme involving the formation of the Brazilian
Supreme Court (STF) and the conflict of
interest. The method used for accomplishment
this work was the theoretician-documentary. In
that context the currently constitutional rules to
form the STF, having as parameter the rules involving
the good governance practices, seems
not to comply to the principals of Corporate
Governance. The creation of public alliances
between the applicants to the Justice position
with the Executive and Legislative branches
implies in a relation known as conflict of interest,
causing prejudices to the independence of
judicial decisions and to the sustainable.

Referência completa: GOMES, Magno Federici; PIGHINI, Bráulio Chagas. Sustentabilidade para Governança, Supremo Tribunal Federal e Conflito de Interesses. Seqüência, Florianópolis, n. 73, v. 37, p. 165-192, ago. 2016 (ISSNe 2177-7055) - Qualis A1 - http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2177-7055.2016v37n73p165