LAC Main Seminar Series: Resilient Constitutional Justice: The Brazilian Experience
Conveners: David Doyle and Felipe Krause, University of Oxford
Speaker: Saul Tourinho Leal, Brazilian constitutional lawyer
What are the mechanisms that can make the constitutional judiciary more resilient in the face of extreme crises? This seminar aims to identify and assess possible answers to this question, in light of the recent Brazilian experience. Constitutional jurisprudence has demonstrated its resilience from an early age. In the United States, when President Thomas Jefferson declared that he would not obey a court order forcing him to swear in a judge appointed by his predecessor and opponent, John Adams, the Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madson (1803), declared itself competent to declare laws unconstitutional, in a pioneering exercise of institutional self-defence. The Brazilian constitutional state, until recent years, had not yet shown the same resilience. But now that the Supreme Federal Court (STF) has survived the four years of harsh attacks suffered during the administration of former President Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022), the Court is showing the world that what happened in countries like Venezuela, Guatemala, Poland and Hungary - whose governments have successfully undermined judicial independence - is not necessarily fate, and that strong protective mechanisms do exist and can be put in place.
KEY WORDS: Brazil. Supreme Court. Attacks. Jair Bolsonaro government. Resistance.
Saul Tourinho Leal is a constitutional lawyer with a PhD in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. He has been practicing before the Brazilian Supreme Court for almost twenty years. He litigated alongside the former President of the Supreme Court, Ayres Britto, an eminent Brazilian jurist who was the rapporteur of important cases such as that which recognized the constitutionality of same-sex unions. He was also a law clerk at the Constitutional Court of South Africa and at the Supreme Court of Israel.
His doctoral thesis, The Right to Happiness, was used by the Supreme Court to reaffirm fundamental rights. Between 2022 and 2023, he was supervised by Professor Dieter Grimm in a post-doctoral programme at Humboldt University, where he presented the paper “Resilient Constitutional Jurisdiction: The Brazilian Experience”.
