Over the past 20 years, the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court has become one of the most influential courts in the world. It has become particularly prominent since Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, sometimes called “Trump of the Tropics,” took office and attacked the constitutional institutions of the country.
Holding the line on autocracy, the Federal Supreme Court intervened in the Covid crisis to ensure that the states in the Brazilian federal system could pick up the responsibilities dropped by the federal government. When Bolsonaro threatened the integrity of the election system, the Electoral Court (consisting of a subset of the Supreme Court judges), held the line and ensured that Brazil could have a free and fair election. When Bolsonaro lost that election and his supporters stormed the Court, the Congress and the Presidential Palace, the Federal Supreme Court disqualified him from running for president again for eight years.
Now, with a giant police file made public in November 2024, the Supreme Court can see in its future that it may have to conduct trials of the main perpetrators of a plot to overthrow the government, allegedly led by Bolsonaro and including a plan to assassinate a Supreme Court justice. As if that wasn’t enough, the Supreme Court has also made national headlines recently by requiring the social media platform X to follow Brazilian law in complying with takedown orders, briefly shuttering the site in Brazil until Elon Musk complied with the law.
A leader in the regulation of social media platforms, AI and disinformation and a defender of both the environment and social rights, the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court has become one of the shining models of “Global South Constitutionalism.”
In this lecture, Court President Luís Roberto Barroso will speak about the role of the court in such turbulent times and the responsibility of the judiciary to preserve democracy against autocratic threats.
About the speaker
The Honorable Luís Roberto Barroso is President of the Federal Supreme Court of Brazil, where he began serving as a justice in 2013. In his capacity as president of the Court he is also president of the National Council of Justice, the self-governing body of the Brazilian judiciary. While on the bench, President Barroso remains a Professor of Constitutional Law at Rio de Janeiro State University.
President Barroso holds an LL.M. from Yale Law School (1988-1989) and an S.J.D. from Rio de Janeiro State University (1990). He has written more than a dozen books on Brazilian constitutional law and many articles, published in Brazil, France, Spain, Portugal, Colombia and Mexico. His English-language articles include: “In defense of the Amazon”in the Harvard International Law Journal (2021); “Technological Revolution, Democratic Recession and Climate Change: The Limits of Law in a Changing World” in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (2020); “Countermajoritarian, Representative, and Enlightened: The Role of Constitutional Courts in Democracies” in the American Journal of Comparative Law (2019); and “Here, There, and Everywhere: Human Dignity in Contemporary Law and in the Transnational Discourse” in the Boston College International and Comparative Law Review (2012). He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School (2011) and has been a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School since 2018. He is also a member of the Yale Law School Global Constitutionalism Seminar.
Lecture will be streamed live at: mediacentrallive.princeton.edu
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