History of Constitutional Review in Brazil (From Foundation to Nowadays) (original) (raw)

The article performs a historical investigation on the formation of the Brazilian constitutional review system from the Imperial Constitution of 1824 until the current Constitution of 1988. More specifically, it aims to offer a critique of the narrative of Brazilian legal discourse, which conceives the current model of judicial review as a product of a gradual evolution of legislation, whose starting point was to be found in the Constitution of 1891. In order to achieve its goal, this essay assumes the premise according to which the system of constitutional review is defined by a political decision during the constituent process, which means to recognize that it is not an inherent function of the judge or of the Judiciary Power. From the historical contextualism approach, this research relies on the examination of historical sources of each of the constituent periods and concludes that the definition of the legitimized authority to say the “last word” in constitutional matters stems from a constellation of cultural, political, and legal factors.