Secularism and the Supreme Court: a study on the decisions of the brazilian Supreme Court related to religious issues and secularism

• Autor(a) principal: Silva Filho, Edson Vieira da
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Barbosa, Rodrigo Pedroso
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Revista de Estudos Empíricos em Direito
• Texto Completo: https://reedrevista.org/reed/article/view/388
• topic: Secularism; Brazilian Supreme Court; empirical research; jurisprudence; secular state; Laicidade; Supremo Tribunal Federal; Pesquisa Empírica; Jurisprudência; Estado Laico.

This empiric research aims to study the decisions from the Brazilian Supreme Court regarding religion, specifically those regarding the concept of secularity and how that is integrated into the votes by the ministers. For that, a qualitative and quantitative empiric research will be conducted, through the analyses of the votes made available on the jurisprudence search platform on the tribunal’s internet site. Initially, for that end, the votes will analyses and, after discarding the ones judged to be non-relevant originated by searching errors, a classification criterion will be created based on the arguments presented on the votes. Based on said criteria, the votes will be classified and, based on that classification, the voting profile of the ministers will be analyzed. The initial hypothesis will be based on the votes cast by the 11 ministers in the ADI 4439. At the end of this research, it was concluded that the ministers preferably do not present any clarifications for the meaning of secularity in their votes or, second as often, present clarifications based on their own personal convictions. Lastly, more infrequently, they will provide doctrinaire references to sustain their positions on the meaning. Several qualitative aspects were identified on the votes, beyond those defined in the initial objectives, such as a tendency of increasing frequency for the security issue in processes on the supreme court. As for the qualitative aspects, due to the low number of processes (11) and votes (30), it was only possible to reach a confidence level of 91.3% (p = 0,.08213), relatively low, however meaningful enough so the initial hypothesis could not be refuted.