Supreme Court Justice Ricardo Lewandowski will retire next Tuesday, April 11. Appointed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006, he served from the bench as a fervent supporter of the Workers’ Party, and is likely to be replaced by an equally devout zealot.
Justice Lewandowski will leave the court a month before he turns 75, the mandatory retirement age. By announcing his early retirement due to “academic and professional commitments,” he achieved two results. First, he helped to take press attention away from former President Jair Bolsonaro’s return to Brazil — a much-hyped event that ultimately flopped. Second, he bought Lula more time to get his successor approved by the Senate this year.
Off-the-record sources have been eager to tell the Brazilian press that Lula is likely to appoint his own personal lawyer, Cristiano Zanin, to the position. Mr. Zanin also currently represents Americanas, the giant retail company embroiled in Brazil’s biggest-ever accounting scandal. However, Lula has not yet announced his decision. On Thursday, he officially accepted Justice Lewandowski’s resignation.
Mr. Lewandowski is an ardent garantista, a term often used in debates about Brazilian law, for which there’s no perfect English translation. Some law scholars argue that garantismo is based on the theory of “penal guaranteeism,” developed by Italian legal scholar Luigi Ferrajoli. It argues for a “minimum penal code” to protect defendants from unjust punishment. In practice, the term garantista is most often used to describe a judge who works...
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