Faculty Bibliography

This paper summarizes the results of a research carried out between January and May 2021 with all Brazilian public companies, identified in such period, aiming to analyze the racial diversity of the positions of members of the board of directors, CEO, and CFO. We obtained detailed answers from about 15% of the total sample of 442 public companies. To test the statistical significance of the results, we applied an evaluation method to all board members and officers of all other public companies, using the same methodology to identify fraudulent enrollments in affirmative action programs at Brazilian universities. Comparison of samples demonstrated that the results were statistically robust, leading to disconcerting conclusions. We identified that 0.00% of the positions of the boards of directors surveyed were occupied by black people and that only 1.05% of them were occupied by brown people. This demonstrates that the chance of a white person occupying some of the highest-paid positions in the country is 58 times greater compared to a non-white person. The results regarding the positions of CEO and CFO were even more impressive since no black or brown people were identified in such positions. Such data confirmed the research hypothesis that the corporate governance of Brazilian public companies reinforces certain characteristics of the Brazilian social structure, deeply marked by patriarchal and racist traits.

The objective of this chapter is the critical analysis of the primary tool for collective rights defense in Brazil: the class action lawsuit that is part of the Brazil’s microsystem for collective litigation. The key question is whether the country’s class action system has satisfactorily served its purpose of deterring and punishing rights violations by large businesses in Brazil. Our hypothesis is that such tool has proved insufficient as a remedy for infringements of the rights of third parties (consumers, workers, investors and even government organs) by private companies.

Abstract The main argument of this work is that the discourse of social and economic rights in Brazil has been appropriated by privileged economic groups with the result that the constitutional protection of those rights is no longer carrying out its function to reduce economic inequality. This article will be divided into three parts. The first is a discussion of the historic context of patrimonialism in Brazil as well as the origins of economic inequality in the country. The second part is devoted to the theoretical debate surrounding the con­stitutional protection of social and economic rights in light of what is often referred to as ‘new constitutionalism’, along with an interpretation of the structure for protecting social and economic rights that is present in the Brazilian constitution. The third part consists of a case study of the current state of the judicialization of the right to health in Brazil, with special attention to free concession of medicine and the new legislation on the subject. In conclusion, the paper argues that judicial decisions on the right to health, in particular, and social and economic rights, in general, have been formalistic, with little regard to their (often negative) distributive impact. The solution is then not to move from individual litiga­tion to collective litigation (eg class actions), but to move from an ‘individual rights’ approach to a ‘distributive’ approach, which takes into account the effects of court decisions not only with respect to the parties involved but also to the rights of the poorest of the poor.