Ghostwriters, Ghost Erasers: Lawyers, Resistance, and Progressive Penal Change in Brazil

• In Event: Global Struggles, Local Practices: Cause Lawyering in Crises of Democracy

Abstract

This paper addresses the role of Global South lawyers and legal culture in the globalization of punishment, investigating how they shape the importation, adaptation, and resistance against Global North penal policies. It examines Brazilian defense attorneys' resistance to an American-inspired ‘Anti-Crime’ bill in 2019. To do so, it uses over 100 interviews with elite legal actors, about 100 hours of observation of legal academic events, and analysis of several legal documents. By constructing a collective biography of defense attorneys, I show how historical developments outside and within criminal law (e.g., the memory of dictatorship, the development of critical criminology within law schools, the importation of a European penal minimalist program) provided Brazilian attorneys with a cohesive anti-punitive identity, allowing them to resist the bill across the legislature, courts, and media. I also show how the institutionalization of graduate legal education and the exponential growth of the market for criminal law services expanded lawyers' political influence, allowing them to 'ghostwrite and erase' several punitive bill provisions and even introduce provisions expanding defendants’ procedural safeguards. Among the resisted changes were restrictions on plea bargaining, a legal mechanism that would have increased incarceration and criminalization.

Author

• Eduardo Gutierrez Cornelius, University of Minnesota