Language and memory are technologies of inscription. So is adjudication. A reading of the Brazilian apparatus from the spoken word to the virtualized decision.
Damares Medina
Instituto Constituição Aberta (ICONS) · Brazil
CISEPS, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
Panel 11.52 — Litigation as a Technology of Government Panel 10.43 — Mini-Publics and Constitutional Adjudication
ICONS / PROJUS · icons.org.br JudX · judx.com.br
icons.org.br · judx.com.bri — inscription
Opening · the human is written
The human being is inscribed in time, in space, in history — through language. And is, in turn, inscribed by it.
Language and memory are not neutral vessels. They are technologies: they decide what endures, what is admissible as record, what counts as having happened. Law is the most consequential of these technologies — it inscribes the human into a binding order.
openingtechnologies of inscription
Opening · the quadrant of media
Law has changed its medium — and each change re-made it.
The decisive break is the last one. Earlier shifts virtualized the instrument and then the process. What is now being virtualized is the decision itself — and the very act of deciding. This is where my two papers enter, as two keys to the same lock.
the spineinstrument → process → decision
Opening · two keys
Key I — discursive / dialogic
Mini-publics as deliberative practice
Reinserting the public into adjudication as a verifiable layer of public reason — without plebiscitary drift. The spoken, deliberating register of law.
Key II — scalar / self-referential
Scalability of the virtualized decision
When decisions are processed at machine scale, the court turns inward — a deferred court, self-referent. The question of the addressee of justice.
Both keys converge on one claim: the precedent is a constitutional technology of power and risk allocation.
two keysdeliberation · scale
● Key I · Panel 10.43
The dialogic key
Mini-publics and constitutional adjudication — reintegrating the public without plebiscitary drift
key Idiscursive · dialogic
Key I · the problem
Openness mechanisms exist — but they are selective, intermittent, and capturable.
Brazil is a high-stakes laboratory. The STF built public hearings, amicus curiae, and — since 2020 — "contextualization hearings" in its Conflict Resolution Unit. Yet experience shows they often operate asymmetrically, are captured by organized interests, and at times function as formal legitimation for decisions already in motion.
Following Hilbink and Kureshi: judicial populism emerges precisely where stable, mediated channels are absent, forcing apex courts to seek legitimacy outside formal structures.
key I · problemcapture · asymmetry
Key I · the model
Deliberative mini-publics as auxiliary listening-and-translation bodies.
They do not decide cases. They add a verifiable layer of representative deliberation — citizens randomly selected, demographically stratified, rigorously briefed — while decisional responsibility stays wholly within the Court. Three functions:
Democratic density — lived, plural experience enters the abstract realm of interpretation.
Institutional translation — bridging the hermetic language of precedent and the public sphere.
Procedural legitimacy — an independent, verifiable record of public reasoning the Court must formally confront.
key I · modeldensity · translation · legitimacy
Key I · sharpening the model
We share the deliberative model — but we refuse to abandon dialogue too soon.
Deliberative constitutionalism has to be pushed past its comfortable border — from a judicial dialogue sealed inside the courts toward an inclusive dialogue across the whole constitutional system. The warning is precise: a deliberativism that pairs deliberative democracy with a strong, self-enclosed court gives up on collaboration prematurely — and ends up accepting the very shortcut it claimed to refuse.
My mini-publics answer that warning. They deliberate; they never decide — but they keep the dialogue open as recurring, collaborative presence, not a single hearing. The model is the watch party: bodies affected by other bodies, a deliberation that begins in lived life rather than juridical abstraction, turning what was distant into something shared.
key I · sharpening the modelinclusive dialogue, not a shortcut
Key I · dialogue with the panel
A vertical axis for a horizontal conversation
Dvořáková (judges as public intellectuals): embedding mini-publics institutionalizes restraint and relevance, so the judicial voice is grounded in structured dialogue — not post-tenure media interventions.
Graaf & Stetsyk (transnational judicial dialogue): they map horizontal dialogue between elite courts — Karlsruhe, Strasbourg, Luxembourg. Mini-publics add the missing vertical dimension: dialogue with society, not only between influencers.
McFadden (weak-form review): mini-publics give strong-form systems a way to keep invalidating power while curing the democratic deficit — without majoritarian capture.
key I · panelvertical dimension
● Key II · Panel 11.52
The scalar key
Litigation as a technology of government — and the self-referent, deferred court
key IIscalar · self-referential
Key II · the thesis
Litigation is not a pathology of governance. It is a policy of the State.
Procedural theory treats legal conflict as malfunction — courts as neutral arenas that domesticate conflict and restore peace. I invert this. Legal conflict operates as a political economy of governance: a state-engineered mechanism that converts procedural uncertainty into a durable resource for public finance and institutional self-preservation.
Drawing on Coase ( The Problem of Social Cost, 1960) and the extractive-institutions frame of Acemoglu & Robinson.
key II · thesisconflict as policy
Key II · induced from data
The concept was induced from real-time data engineering — while building JudX.
83 M
ongoing lawsuits in one national system
99.5 %
of the caseload adjudicated on virtual platforms
At this scale, qualitative dogmatics fall silent. The numbers reveal an ecosystem designed for automated non-resolution — the judiciary as a macroeconomic buffer.
key II · scaleautomated non-resolution
Key II · the apparatus, to the apex
A reconstruction of the Brazilian judicial apparatus and its magnitude
key II · funnel85% screened at the presidency
Key II · where proportionality cannot enter
The privilégio processual is the exact zone proportionality cannot reach.
As Virgílio Afonso da Silva shows, proportionality carries an intense argumentative burden. But the state-controlling grammar of proportionality falls silent in the domain of state procedure. When the State acts through procedural design, it bypasses substantive scrutiny under the guise of administrative routine.
0 risk
Treasury: fee exemption, extended deadlines, zero patrimonial risk
1,958 h/yr
compliance cost borne by private firms
3 % GDP
consumed by the judicial infrastructure
key II · privilegehonorários de sucumbência
Key II · the concept
The legal externality of state litigation.
The State transfers to society the costs of conflict — delay, unpredictability, foregone investment — while internalizing the benefits: cash flow, deferred liabilities, and the remuneration of its own agents.
As Scott Stephenson notes, courts are justified when they protect the open processes of democratic government from blockage. The data reveals the inversion: the court process itself becomes the primary instrument of blockage and extraction. The process ceases to reinforce representation; it reinforces state domination.
key II · externalitysociety pays, the state internalizes
Key II · the meaning of justice
A justice that defers itself becomes self-referent.
When the decision is virtualized and scaled, and the apex court manages liabilities by leaving them permanently unresolved, justice turns inward. The deferred court answers to its own procedure, its own throughput, its own buffer — not to the litigant before it. Procedure becomes accounting; judicial time becomes a financial instrument.
If justice has become revenue, and procedure has become accounting — what, then, is the sense of justice?
key II · deferred courtself-referent justice
● Closing · the opening, returned
Who is the addressee of an automated justice?
A justice that monocratically refuses 85% of what reaches the STF — at the presidency, before merits — in decisions confirmed by virtual panels. If the public is treated as an adversarial crowd or a passive audience, the court has no addressee at all.
This is where the two keys close on each other. The precedent as a technology of power requires reconstruction: an architecture that turns public presence into qualified public reason. Mini-publics are not a populist gesture — they are how an automated, deferred court re-acquires an addressee.
a pasta está vazia. a memória, não.
closing · the aberturare-acquiring an addressee
The instruments · cartography of constitutional litigation
Where these claims are built and tested
PROJUS / ICONS
icons.org.br
A cartography of the constitutional contentious: STF jurisprudence mapped article-by-article onto the 1988 Constitution — a graph of 473,000+ edges. Operating since 2014.
JudX — jurisprudential intelligence
judx.com.br
A prediction layer over ~2.9M STF decisions (2000–2026): provision rate → odds; procedural risk → probability of entry; circularity → correction factor; pivotal function → coalition variable.
instrumentsPROJUS · ICONS · JudX
Access · the platforms & this deck
Two instruments, one cartography — and this deck to take with you
This deck
icons.org.br/dublin2026
slides & speaker notes
ICONS / PROJUS · icons.org.br the cartography of the constitutional contentious — STF jurisprudence mapped article-by-article onto the 1988 Constitution.
JudX · judx.com.br jurisprudential intelligence — a prediction layer over ~2.9M STF decisions.
Scan to carry the slides and the speaker notes with you — hosted as a tab of the ICONS site.
accessscan · open · share
● ICON-S 2026 · Dublin
Justice has become revenue; procedure has become accounting; litigation has become a technology of power. The task is to give the deferred court an addressee again.