Ghostwriters, Ghost Erasers: Lawyers, Resistance, and Progressive Penal Change in Brazil

Lawyers and legal culture are often absent in works on legal globalization, particularly in studies of the globalization of crime control. This paper addresses the role of Global South lawyers and legal culture in the globalization of penal policy, investigating how they shape the importation, adaptation, and resistance to Global North penal policies. To do so, I analyze data collected in Brazil between 2022 and 2023: 116 interviews with lawyers, judges, law professors, and prosecutors; observation of legal academic events, legislative hearings, and court proceedings; and analysis of legal scholarship, statutes, and court records. In this paper, I investigate Brazilian defense attorneys’ resistance to an American-inspired criminal law bill. Titled Anti-Crime Act, the bill was proposed by Bolsonaro’s Minister of Justice and former Car Wash judge, Sergio Moro, in 2019. I found that, after intense legal mobilization, lawyers managed to impose restrictions on plea bargaining, a legal mechanism that would have increased incarceration and criminalization, from the final bill. By constructing a collective biography of defense attorneys, I show how historical developments outside and within criminal law (e.g., the memory of dictatorship, the development of critical criminology within law schools, the importation of a European penal minimalist program) provided Brazilian attorneys with a cohesive anti-punitive identity, allowing them to resist the bill across the legislature, courts, and media. I also show how the institutionalization of graduate legal education and the exponential growth of the market for criminal law services expanded lawyers’ political influence, allowing them to ‘ghostwrite and erase’ provisions in Moro’s bill in backstage meetings with legislative actors. While punishment and society scholars have focused on state actors and social movements’ ability to resist carceral expansion, I show how the legal field can produce resistance through critical legal education and the development of progressive professional identities.