ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the field of judicial politics in Brazil. After highlighting the main features of the justice system and placing this system within the broader context of Brazilian politics, the chapter’s two core sections focus on: (1) the four key areas of inquiry in judicial politics – empowerment, activation, behavior, and the impact of justice institutions; and (2) how these four key phenomena have been studied in Brazil. Throughout, we emphasize major theoretical approaches while also attending to divergent, less prominent approaches, identifying promising areas of future inquiry in both theory building and theory testing. We then discuss the legal dimensions of the recent crisis stemming from the Lava Jato scandal. In sum, we argue that Brazilian judicial politics constitutes a fertile terrain for research, with substantial opportunities for a wide range of research agendas, and we identify particularly promising areas, including the dramatic intersection of law and politics in the current crisis.
