This issue of the DIREITO GV LAW REVIEW is divided into two parts. The first part presents a special dossier on the 70th anniversary of Bretton Woods, which resulted from a call for papers by our then Editor-in-Chief, Mr. José Rodrigo Rodriguez, and FGV DIREITO SP’s Professor Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin. The second part of this issue includes articles on a variety of subjects received through the normal submission process.
2014 is the 70th anniversary of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, held at Bretton Woods, which sought to regulate the main axes – financial, monetary and trade – of the international economic system. While it cannot be said that the anniversary enjoyed a high profile nationally or internationally, the last seven years have been very fruitful in terms of the intellectual output regarding the conference itself, as well as on how to resurrect some of its pillars with a view to maintaining global economic stability.
Attempts to come up with new diagnostics and the search to re-imagine the international monetary and financial systems have brought legal scholars into the debate. For many years, and markedly after the Bretton Woods system for monetary coordination and regulation of countries’ capital accounts broke down, legal research into the monetary and financial systems was relegated to exclusively domestic analysis. So, it was remarkable that for the first time, in July 2014, the meeting of the Society of International Economic Law in Bern featured a panel exclusively on the financial system and another panel on the relationship between trade and exchange. Moreover, one of the conference’s main keynote speakers focused on the coordination of the international financial system. It is worthy of note that the debate on monetary and financial fields has now been reopened for legal scholars.
In view of this, it is very satisfying to write this editorial. After a careful process of analysis of the submissions for this special dossier, the articles found herein reflect the call for papers’ main objective: legal research with an interdisciplinary perspective, which considers the position of Brazil and other countries of the global South, and which takes into consideration particularly sensitive issues for these countries. Brazil has been an important political player in the debate, both within international organizations, and at coordination forums. However, the Brazilian Academia is still not significant in this field. This special issue aims to take a step towards the expansion of the Brazilian debate on monetary and international financial systems and their role in the contemporary global economy, and to provide a stimulus to those interested in exploring this research agenda.
In addition to the special dossier, and strengthening our ongoing commitment to the participation of foreign authors in our journal, the current issue includes an article by Yaniza Giraldo Restrepo, which deals with the relationship between the development and strengthening of the Israeli Supreme Court and its actions in cases relating to the Palestinian occupied territories, and another article by Erika M. Isler Soto, which analyzes the constitutionalization of consumer rights in Chile.
The publication of Latin American authors in Spanish strengthens the journal’s commitment to internationalization, but also reaffirms our understanding that the improvement of legal research in Brazil will not result exclusively from a dialogue with the North conducted in English, but can also occur in Spanish, especially through exchange with Latin American countries. The importance of this dialogue in Spanish is demonstrated by the presence of an article by David Almagro Castro, a Brazilian researcher who has written an original paper in Spanish on Spain’s experience of the financing of political parties and its impact on the country’s democratic model.
This issue also includes an article by Silviana L. Henkes on the legal and political challenges involved in the unresolved balance between economic development and environmental and social issues in the case of the transposition of the São Francisco River. There is also a set of theoretical and empirical articles about interpretation and legal reasoning in the Brazilian courts, especially the Supreme Court.
Josué Mastrodi studies the issue of the balance of rights and proportionality of judicial decisions from a theoretical perspective, and presents a critique of what he calls “the fictitious nature” of the postulate of proportionality in solving real conflicts. Victor Carlos Nascimento dos Santos analyzes the plausibility of the arguments put forward by Justice Gilmar Mendes in RCL. 4.335-5/AC in his defense of the thesis of “constitutional mutation” of article 52 of the Brazilian Federal Constitution, which would imply the finding of a modification in the meaning of the constitutional text not by way of judicial interpretation, but from an implicit acceptance of a changed meaning in the face of changes in the social context. Claudia Rosane Roesler and Paulo Alves Santos discuss, from extensive empirical research, how the regional courts and the Supreme Court deal with cases relating to same-sex marriage, analyzing, in the regional courts, the argumentative structure adopted and, in the case of the Supreme Court critically evaluating the arguments deployed. Finally, Carlos Henrique Haddad Borlido and Lucas Bacelette Otto Quaresma analyze, from an empirical perspective, the criteria adopted by the Supreme Court to distinguish undue delay versus reasonable time in criminal cases.
Enjoy your reading!
Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin
Coeditor of the special issue “70
years of Bretton Woods: balances and perspectives”
Catarina
Helena Cortada Barbieri
Editor-in-Chief
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jul-Dec 2014
