Carvalho on Three Books and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Today? What Do the Works of Kafka, Orwell, and Faoro Have In Common With Today's Brazilian Supreme Court?

Cristiano Carvalho, University of Sao Paulo, Faculty of Law, Department of Economic, Financial, and Tax Law, has published Three Books and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Today - What do the works of Kafka, Orwell, and Faoro have in common with today's Brazilian Supreme Court? originally in Portuguese on May 27, 2025 at www.migalhas.com.br. Here is the abstract.

This article examines the current role of the Brazilian Supreme Court through the lens of three seminal works: The Trial by Franz Kafka, 1984 by George Orwell, and Os Donos do Poder by Raymundo Faoro. Drawing parallels between literary dystopias and institutional reality, the text argues that the Court has progressively abandoned its constitutional mandate as guardian of rights and due process, assuming instead a protagonistic and often unchecked political role. The article reflects on the erosion of the rule of law, the inversion of legal logic, and the rise of selective repression, suggesting that future historians may view this period as one of the darkest chapters in Brazilian constitutional history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Brazilian Law and Literature

Greta Olson, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, has published Towards a Comparative and Localized Study of Brazilian Law and Literature in Direito e Literatura na Virada do Milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium 15-38 (Sonja Arnold and Michael Korfmann eds., Porto Alegre: Editora Dublinense, 2014).  Here is the abstract.

I am grateful to the editors of this volume for allowing me to contribute in the atypical form of a comment on the subject of the volume rather than with a scholarly essay. Composing an essay that might have made manifest in print what the title of my talk at the conference Literatura e Direito na virada do milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium had promised turned out to be an impossibility. In entitling my talk “Law and Literature in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany (and Brazil): Comparing Legal Systems, Literatures, and Cultural Preoccupations,” I discovered that I had promised too much. As an expatriate US American living in Germany and teaching British and American studies, I could not match the knowing I have of German, British, and American legal systems, literatures,and social issues with enough information about Brazil in a short time and without facility in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus the following has the character of a programmatic sketch rather than an analytic description.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.