The facilitation of credit for hyperconsumption was crucial to the emergence of over-indebtedness, affecting good-faith consumers and preventing them from honoring debts without compromising the existential minimum. Its threat to human dignity led to Law 14.181/2021, which improved the Consumer Protection Code with measures to address over-indebtedness. The legislation mandated the preservation of the existential minimum 'under regulatory terms,' materialized by Decrees 11.150/2022 and 11.567/2023. However, it was set at R$ 600.00, insufficient to cover basic expenses, including the vital minimum, so that only consumers unable to ensure this amount to sustain a 'dignified life' would be considered over-indebted. Using the deductive method, the article comparatively analyzes, in relation to the constitutional construction of the right to the existential minimum, the impacts of the regulation on human dignity and the protection of over-indebted consumers, questioning its constitutionality, as the rule established an immutable and generic parameter for all cases of over-indebtedness. Finally, considering the operational nature of the existential minimum, an alternative to the threshold set by Decree 11.567/2023 is proposed, adopting a variable percentage based on the consumer's net monthly income.
Since the end of the last century, various empirical investigations have shown that individual decisions are not always within the parameters of an expected rationality; on the contrary, judgments and decisions are often not rational. Our decisions are often influenced by supposedly irrelevant external factors such as heuristics, biases and emotions. This paper explains that these external factors are present in the decisions of magistrates of ordinary justice and constitutional judges, focusing the analysis on some decisions of the Peruvian Constitutional Court.
A defining characteristic of cooperative federalism, as construed by Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court, lies in the interlocking of powers and responsibilities across various levels of government. This configuration is regarded as a functional requirement for enhancing the cohesion of the federal arrangement. In contrast, scholars and political theorists have associated such interlocking with the cooperative model of federalism exemplified, above all, by the German experience. This article aims to examine how the Brazilian constitutional jurisprudence understands this institutional interlocking dynamics and to contrast it with key theoretical and doctrinal perspectives. Specifically, it investigates whether such federal arrangement is rooted in voluntary intergovernmental agreements that preserve the political autonomy of subnational units, or whether it takes on a mandatory basis that restricts their decision-making authority. The study also explores the implications of this dynamic in two critical domains: (a) the allocation of responsibility for jointly implemented policies and actions, and (b) the normative scope and modes of implementation of the constitutional duty to cooperate.
This paper analyzes the possibility of incorporating the gender perspective in the reasoning to be carried out by the Comptroller General of the Republic of Venezuela to impose the sanctions of suspension from office without pay for a period not exceeding twenty-four (24) months, dismissal or disqualification from the exercise of public functions for a maximum of fifteen (15) years, as provided in Article 105 of the Organic Law of the Comptroller General of the Republic and of the National Fiscal Control System.
The study addresses the following research problem: how has the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) been applied (or set aside) by Brazil’s Federal Regional Courts (TRFs) of the 1st through 5th Regions (03 Dec. 2008–31 Dec. 2021), and to what extent does such application incorporate (or fail to incorporate) conventionality control and the case law of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)? The research employs an empirical, jurisprudential methodology (quantitative approach, with an analytical cut), based on a survey of appellate decisions retrieved from the TRFs’ official websites through searches conducted exclusively in the headnotes (ementas) using ACHR-related terms. In the period 2009–2021, out of 5,783,642 appellate decisions published, only 328 (0.005%) mention the ACHR in the headnote. The distribution of these 328 rulings by legal field is concentrated in Criminal Law (30.79%), Criminal Procedure (27.44%), and Civil Law (16.16%), totaling 60.36% within the criminal axis (also including Criminal Enforcement). Social Security and Tax Law – fields that account for the largest caseload in the Federal Judiciary – appear in only 1.22% (4 rulings). The main inferences are: (a) the concentration of ACHR use in criminal matters; (b) the low applicability of the ACHR in the legal fields that constitute the bulk of the Federal Judiciary’s docket; (c) the ancillary character of ACHR reliance in judicial reasoning and its reduced role as an autonomous rights-protecting norm; (d) the predominantly ancillary use of the ACHR in judicial reasoning stems, in part, from a perceived substantive overlap between the ACHR’s protective provisions and those enshrined in the Federal Constitution; (e) conventionality control of domestic norms is predominantly tied to positions previously settled by higher courts, such as the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the Superior Court of Justice (STJ); and (f) the Federal Judiciary’s practical disregard of the Inter-American System’s competent interpretive bodies for construing the ACHR.
