Upon taking office for a two-year stint as head of the Brazilian Supreme Court in November 2018, Justice Dias Toffoli said it was time for the judicial branch to “step out of the spotlight” acting more as umpires rather than active players. Justice Toffoli took charge off the back of a string of headline-catching cases for the court, including one which kept former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — the frontrunner at the time — out of the 2018 presidential election, and later sent him to prison.
However, that promise of temperance was short-lived. In March 2019, the then-chief...
