Symposium Examines Civil Justice in Brazil
A group of judges, lawyers, and scholars from Brazil convened in New Haven on Jan. 27 for a symposium on civil justice in Brazil. The keynote was delivered by Luis Roberto Barroso ’89 LLM, the president of the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil. The chief justice focused his remarks on the need for reform of the civil justice system.
A good number of the papers addressed attempts of Brazilian jurists to utilize U.S. institutions such as discovery, the structural injunction, and settlement techniques for mass torts. The Brazilian practice of allocating costs to the winner of the litigation was also examined. The paper by Edilson Vitorelli, now a federal judge, on the renewed interest in structural litigation in Brazil, noted the commonalities that make comparison of the Brazilian and American systems apt — both are large countries with highly heterogenous populations in economic, cultural, and racial terms and, despite the stark differences between common law and civil law systems, the two are converging: Brazil has been steadily moving towards a system of binding precedents while the U.S. has moved away from the dominance of common law institutions (here Judge Vitorelli cited Guido Calabresi’s ’58 work, “A Common Law for the Age of Statutes”).
Other topics included the cost of civil litigation in Brazil, access to justice, mechanisms for the disclosure and sharing of information, the use of structural injunctions, and the effect of foreign courts that assert jurisdiction in Brazilian cases.
The event was organized by Wilson Pimentel, a lawyer at Bermudes Advogados, professor of law at the Fundação Getulio Vargas in Rio de Janeiro, and a visiting researcher at Yale Law School. Abbe R. Gluck ’00, Alfred M. Rankin Professor of Law; Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law; Owen Fiss, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Law; and Professor of Law Sarath Sanga ’14 offered their comments in the papers presented in the sessions they chaired. The authors are incorporating the feedback into their papers and plans are being formulated for publication in English and Portuguese.
