A tradição Brasileira em Harmonizar a Common Law

This study examines Brazil’s distinctive ability to incorporate heterogeneous legal models while maintaining systemic coherence. Using Comparative Law as its analytical framework, it argues that the country’s long history of legal transplants, shaped by colonial stratifications, European codifications, and contemporary global influences, has produced a hybrid legal order capable of harmonizing civil law and common law elements. This openness, however, creates vulnerabilities. Legal borrowing increasingly operates within a geopolitical economy of soft power, in which foreign models are adopted under the rhetoric of neutrality and modernization, even when they are dysfunctional in their original contexts. The article critiques the unreflective importation of American-style adversarial procedures, plea bargaining, economic analysis of law and alternative dispute resolution. Such models may undermine constitutional balances, access to justice, and democratic adjudication. By combining theories of legal transplants, legal formants, and functionalism, the study calls for a more context-sensitive comparative method able to distinguish genuine innovation from Trojan-horse models that erode Brazil’s legal sovereignty.