Abstract
Usually, studies about the centralization of the constitutional adjudication in the Brazilian Supreme Court adopt as a premise that an increase in legal certainty will lead to a gain in efficiency, in a context of a growing caseload on the Judicial Branch. In this paper, this premise is analyzed based on the comparative assessment of the speeches in law-making processes that changed the constitutional text and the data collected in the research “Who is Interested in the Concentrated System of Judicial Review?”. The article concludes that the increase in the Brazilian Supreme Court’s power to adjudicate the Constitution during the last 50 years did not result in the reduction of the excessive caseload. The methods of selection of cases were more efficient, however. At the same time, the amount of the court’s decisions has been stable. The paper concludes that this fact refutes the reiterated argument that the operation of the Court tends to be unviable.
Brazilian Supreme Court; concentrated control; historical evolution; excessive caseload
