The Associated Press sets out how the collapse of Banco Master, a mid-sized bank shut down last November after a fraud investigation, has reached the Brazilian Supreme Court three weeks before a presidential election. According to documents in the investigation, Justice Alexandre de Moraes provided legal advice to the bank’s former head Daniel Vorcaro, who has …
Rafael Henrique Silva de Mello, 45, was killed on the night of August 27 after scheduling a meeting at a Campinas property with people who had presented themselves as new clients. Security cameras recorded two men arriving by motorcycle, forcing him out of the building onto the pavement, and shooting him during a struggle; his phone was taken. …
Dias, V. M., & Schapiro, M. G. (2026). Resisting democratic backsliding from within the state: Environmental politics in Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Policy Studies Journal. https://doi.org/10.1111/psj.70101 The article argues that polycentric governance can enable meaningful resistance to democratic backsliding from within the state by fragmenting executive power across multiple institutions with overlapping authority. Focusing on environmental politics …
Kapiszewski, D. (2011). Tactical balancing: High court decision making on politically crucial cases. Law & Society Review, 45(2), 471-506. This article advances a new account of judicial behavior: the thesis of tactical balancing. Building on existing models of judicial decision making, the thesis posits that high court justices balance a discrete set of considerations—justices’ ideologies, their institutional …
Aguilar, A. (2012). Institutional changes in the public prosecutor’s office: The cases of Mexico, Chile and Brazil. Mexican law review, 4(2), 261-290. Given the critical role played by the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the criminal justice system, the reform of its powers and underlying framework is fundamental in enhancing the rule of law and democracy. …
The Trump administration has escalated tensions with Brazil by sanctioning Viviane Barci de Moraes, wife of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, who oversaw the criminal case against Jair Bolsonaro. The U.S. also revoked visas for six senior Brazilian officials and targeted the Lex Institute, a family-linked financial entity it suspects could be used to …
de Sa e Silva, F. (2020). From Car Wash to Bolsonaro: Law and lawyers in Brazil’s illiberal turn (2014–2018). Journal of Law and Society, 47(S1), S51–S73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12250 The article examines the role of law and lawyers in Brazil’s recent democratic decline. While legal professionals are often depicted as either victims of or counterforces …
B.J. Kyle, A.G. Reiter, Military Courts, Civil-Military Relations, and the Legal Battle for Democracy: The Politics of Military Justice (1st ed.). London: Routledge, 2021. Summary: The interaction between military and civilian courts, the political power that legal prerogatives can provide to the armed forces, and the difficult process civilian politicians face in reforming military justice remain …
Vitor Martins Dias, “Rule by Law in Democratic Regimes: How Legal Actors Undermined Democracy in Brazil.” March 19, 2025. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5185132 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5185132 Summary: This article analyzes how prosecutors, judges, and police officers coordinated efforts that undermined the rule of law in Brazil, the world’s fourth-largest democracy. Such practices are often institutionalized in non-democratic …
This article investigates how the legacies of authoritarian legal systems influence the capacity of attorneys to drive judicial reform in emerging democracies, with case studies from Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.