Access-to-Justice Reforms: A Brazilian Case Study of Bank Litigation Related to Heterodox Economic Plans
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Helena C. Refosco
Abstract
Between 2003 and 2016, Brazil carried out a World Bank-inspired “rule-of-law” reform that has failed to substantially increase access to justice. To buttress such a disheartening conclusion, this paper includes a case study of Brazil’s biggest litigation ever, which centered on the losses that bank customers had incurred because of heterodox national economic plans implemented in the late 1980s and early 1990s. By showing that the system of binding precedents consolidated in the reform ended up favoring “repeat players” over “one-shotters” in this litigation, this paper seeks to explain how institutional reforms that fail to tackle deep inequalities may backfire.
Acknowledgments
This article took much of its inspiration from a case study I developed in my doctoral thesis, which was brilliantly supervised by Professor Carlos Portugal Gouvêa, of the University of São Paulo (USP) Law School, and by Professor David Kennedy, my Faculty Advisor during my Visiting Research Fellowship at Harvard Law School. I am indebted to both of them for their attention and encouragement. Moreover, I must offer special thanks to Justice Ricardo Lewandowski, of Brazil’s Federal Supreme Court, and Appellate Judge Carlos Alberto de Salles, of the São Paulo State Court of Justice, as well as to Professors Maria Tereza Sadek, Oscar Vilhena Vieira, and Daniela Monteiro Gabbay. As the members of the USP Review Board before which I defended my Ph.D. thesis, these renowned legal experts put forth a number of relevant—and heartening—observations that have proved invaluable to my subsequent scholarly efforts. I must express my gratitude to Angel Gabriel Cabrera Silva, Beatriz Botero Arcila, Gustavo Sampaio de Abreu Ribeiro, Joanna Vieira Noronha, Johnathan E. Amacker, Lílian Cintra de Melo, and Yi Shin Tang, as well as to the participants of the Institute for Global Law and Policy/Harvard Law School Conference (IGLP: The Conference), for their myriad contributions to this article. And, of course, I deeply thank my husband Jean-Paul Veiga da Rocha, Professor of “Law, Money, and Society” at USP Law School, whose insights and suggestions have so enriched this and other examples of my work. For more information on the subject of this article, see Helena C. Refosco, Ação Coletiva e Democratização Do Acesso à Justiça (Quartier Latin, 1st ed. 2018).
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Articles
- Is the International Community Ready for the Next Pandemic Wave? A Legal Analysis of the Preparedness Rules Codified in Universal Instruments and of their Impact in the Light of the COVID-19 Experience
- Access-to-Justice Reforms: A Brazilian Case Study of Bank Litigation Related to Heterodox Economic Plans
- Quality of Energy, Energy Access and Law within the Cuban Hydropower Context
- Limiting Freedom During the Covid-19 Emergency in Italy: Short Notes on the New “Populist Rule of Law”
- Contracting Out Public Services to the Private Sector in the UK: Issues and Considerations
- Liability for the Fact of Autonomous Artificial Intelligence Agents. Things, Agencies and Legal Actors
- Put Dialectics into the Machine: Protection against Automatic-decision-making through a Deeper Understanding of Contestability by Design
- The Issue of Immunity of Private Actors Exercising Public Authority and the New Paradigm of International Law
- Ruling without Rules: Not Only Nudges. Regulation beyond Normativity
- Breaking out of the Regulatory Delusion. The Ban to Surrogacy and the Foundations of European Constitutionalism
- The Transplant of Trusts in Different Legal Jurisdictions: The Example of China
- The New EU Rules on Insurance Customer/Policyholder Protection Viewed against the NAIC Model Acts
