O Brasil tem visto um forte processo de judicialização de sua vida pública. Hoje, a Justiça exerce um papel político importante no país, mas é marcada pela ineficiência na solução de disputas e cobrança de créditos. Críticas à expansão desse papel político são, pois, abundantes. Diz-se que (i) geraria instabilidade institucional e um ambiente hostil ao desenvolvimento (crítica institucional); (ii) produziria resultados ilegítimos (preferências judiciais substituiriam decisões majoritárias - crítica de legitimidade) e (iii) resultaria em ações inefetivas, pois o aparato das cortes não é adequado a resolver conflitos policêntricos e prospectivos (crítica instrumental). Este trabalho analisa o processo brasileiro de judicialização e os argumentos centrais da crítica instrumental. Sugere que ela refere-se a um modelo de direito e justiça que está em transformação. No modelo emergente, a justiça distributiva é reintroduzida na dinâmica legal e a administração de interesses sobrepuja, aos poucos, a tutela de direitos. Essas mudanças, mais a judicialização, levam a alterações importantes no processo judicial. Reconhecendo os problemas daí decorrentes, a tese sugere um caráter virtuoso desse novo contencioso de direito público emergente. Ele parece forjar um mecanismo de reforço de participação política que pode avançar a democracia e melhorar condições de igualdade política.

From democratization in the mid 80? on, Brazilian public life has been forced into an increasingly intense process of judicialization. Lack of confidence in representative institutions, a very open-texted charter of social and economic rights, an important political use of the Judiciary by the oppositions, and other related factors seem to be implicated in this. Brazilian justice holds today a considerable political power, but that is just part of a story. It is also astonishingly inefficient as a services provider, and fails to respond to most of its dispute-solving and credit-enforcement functions. Criticism about the expansion of the political role of the Judiciary in this context is profuse. First, it is said to generate institutional instability, which in turn would bring out a hostile environment for economic growth. Second, it is said to be illegitimate, as far as politicized judges may often replace majoritarian decisions by their own. Third, it is said that litigation involving political issues and social reform tend to be erratic and ineffective, because the institutional designs of both courts and their processes are not adequate to regulate polycentric and prospective conflicts. This work puts Brazilian judicialization into context, and analyses the main arguments of the institutional capacity critique (which is called in here the instrumental critique). The author suggests that the instrumental critique refers to a certain model of law and justice that has been changing (both globally and in Brazil) since the end of the last century. In the emergent model, distributive justice is reintroduced into the dynamics of law, and the administration of diffuse interests slowly replaces the adjudication of individual rights as the paradigmatic activity of the Judiciary. Those changes in both law and justice, along with judicialization, are argued to have lead to other important changes in the design of the judicial process in Brazil. Despite the many problems related to those changes, the ending notes of this work point to a possible virtuous character of the new Brazilian public law litigation. As stated herein, this litigation seems to be creating a participation-reinforcing device that in the long run may foster democracy and political equality.