Juristocracy in Brazil Ran Hirschl's Perspective About Judicial Empowerment

Abstract

Within the classical view of separation of powers, the judiciary originally occupied the weaker position. What is observed today, however, is a displacement of power from representative institutions to the judiciary, erecting a new kind of political regime that the Canadian political scientist Ran Hirschl called juristocracy. This paper intends to discuss this movement basing on the idea of hegemonic preservation, presented by Hirschl in his work Towards Juristocracy whose central hypothesis is that the political, economic and social elites voluntarily transfer power to the judiciary, when threatened of losing their hegemony in the political sphere. In Brazil, the 1988 Constitution turned the Supreme Court into one of the world's most powerful courts, which works at the same time as constitutional court, court of appeals and criminal court, responsible for deciding the most fundamental issues for brazilian society. We present at first, the examples used by Hirschl to illustrate his thesis about the judicial empowerment through constitutionalization, analyzing the political and economic changes in recent history of Israel, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, followed by an analysis of the phenomenon in Brazil. We conclude that it is not possible to determine, in principle, the occurrence of hegemonic preservation in Brazil, but that Hirschl's analysis that offers an answer that challenges the traditional view on the judicialization of politics, contributes to the discussion and analysis of the phenomenon in Brazil.