In February 2026, a justice of Brazil's Supreme Court stepped down from a fraud investigation. Days later, his colleagues declared that no ground for disqualification existed. The rule said he could stay; something else made him go.

This work in progress draws on two Brazilian episodes to illustrate a claim about institutional design. Brazilian procedure protects impartiality through an exhaustive statutory list of disqualifying circumstances; American law relies on an open-ended standard applied case by case (Caperton v. Massey, 2009). Neither mechanism decided the 2026 case. Reputation did. In a separate episode from the same period, an earlier conviction was set aside only after the trial judge's later public career revealed a partiality no formal rule had captured.

Both models assume that bias will be disclosed or observed, an assumption that holds for episodic conflicts and fails for structural ones. No system protects impartiality itself; each protects a proxy for it, and the proxy it chooses determines the failures it cannot see. The claim is that reputation is already doing the work the rules claim to do — and that a system designed as if rules were doing it will keep failing in the cases that matter most.

Maria Gabriela Ferreira is a Ph.D. candidate in law at the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), where she also earned her master's degree in civil procedural law, and a senior attorney in São Paulo, where her practice is in civil litigation and arbitration. She is the author of Ocompartilhamento de competências no processo civil [Competence Sharing in Civil Procedure] (JusPodivm, 2020). Her Ph.D thesis examines how Brazilian civil procedure safeguards judicial impartiality. She completed graduate coursework in the economic analysis of civil procedure at the University of São Paulo Law School, writing there on judicial decision-making and on what behavioral economics implies for the assumption that adjudication is a purely rational process.

This event is cosponsored by the University of Chicago Law School's Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity, and International Law Society.

Lunch will be provided. Please submit dietary requests eight business days prior to the program to Aican Nguyen at aican@uchicago.edu. Although we will try to accommodate dietary needs, it is not guaranteed.