The U.S. Supreme Court, once seen as a bastion of discretion and institutional sobriety, is undergoing a profound transformation. In a recent article published by The Economist under the title “The Supreme Court has become a great place to build your brand,” the British publication notes that justices from both sides of the ideological spectrum are increasingly concerned with promoting their own ideas and personal brands rather than with the Court’s institutional legitimacy. While this phenomenon may come as a surprise in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, in Brazil it feels like déjà vu. The Federal Supreme Court (STF) not only anticipated the era of judicial “celebrity culture,” but institutionalized it on an unprecedented scale, transforming what should be a collegial body into an archipelago of media personalities.
The American Diagnosis: Personal Brands and Dissent
The phenomenon described by *The Economist* reflects a cultural shift at the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices are building personal brands through books, speaking tours, and media appearances. Justice Amy Coney Barrett recently released a book with a $2 million advance, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reported more than $2 million in advances for her memoirs. Sonia Sotomayor, the Court’s most prolific author, promotes children’s books at events across the country, and Neil Gorsuch has released works with broad popular appeal.
The American legal community had already been warning about this phenomenon. In 2020, Professor Suzanna Sherry coined the term “Kardashian Court” to describe the dysfunction caused by the excess of separate opinions, concurring opinions, and dissenting opinions that judges issue to please their fan bases and strengthen their personal brands, to the detriment of legal clarity. Professor Richard Hasen also diagnosed “Celebrity Justice,” arguing that the pursuit of public acclaim compromises judicial independence and institutional cohesion.
The Brazilian Paradox: Transparency as a Spectacle
While in the United States, the celebrity culture of the judiciary exists despite the institutional framework—since judges serve for life and the Court does not broadcast its deliberations on video—in Brazil, it is driven by the system itself. The STF has institutionalized this overexposure.
The most emblematic example of this quest for media influence occurred in August 2025, when the STF, under the presidency of Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, organized the event “Leis e Likes.” The initiative brought together 26 digital influencers with millions of followers for an “immersion” at the Court, with the explicit goal of promoting a “positive image” of the court. The Brazilian Supreme Court not only embraces the logic of social media but also actively acts as a content producer and public relations manager.
It is true that advocates of the Brazilian model argue that TV Justiça has democratized access to information and that radical transparency represents a civilizational advance over the secrecy of traditional courts. There is merit to this argument. However, as researcher Grazielle Albuquerque has demonstrated, what we see in practice is not transparency that educates, but exposure that personalizes: “the prominence of the judiciary with a face, name, and personality—and not merely as an image of a court—emerges with these milestones.” Transparency, when captured by the logic of spectacle, ceases to serve accountability and begins to fuel the cult of personality.
Original Sin
The Supreme Court’s capitulation to public opinion reached its peak during Operation Car Wash, an episode that left an indelible mark on the Court’s recent history and ushered in a new era of criminal justice in Brazil. During the operation’s heyday, the Supreme Court committed the grave error of allowing the “Curitiba Republic” to act without proper constitutional oversight, bowing to popular outcry and media pressure instead of exercising its constitutional role.
Instead of acting as the guardian of fundamental rights and guarantees, the Supreme Federal Court tacitly endorsed what Justice Gilmar Mendes would later call “Curitiba criminal law.” The sensationalization of arrests became the norm. Plea bargaining—a mechanism that, in its original conception, constitutes the defendant’s right to cooperate with the justice system in exchange for leniency—was fundamentally distorted. In the Brazil of Operation Car Wash, it ceased to be a voluntary option for the accused and became the very purpose of arrest. The content of the plea bargains began to be constantly leaked on broadcast TV, as if it were a series in which each day brought a new episode to attract the general public, transforming the criminal process into entertainment and the lives of the accused into a spectacle for daily consumption. As the jurist Antônio Mariz de Oliveira denounced: “With Operation Car Wash, another form of pretrial detention has emerged: detention for the purpose of plea bargaining. This differs slightly from torture: in torture, the subject says what the torturer wants; in imprisonment for plea bargaining, the subject says what the Public Prosecutor’s Office wants.”
By the time the Supreme Federal Court (STF) finally decided to intervene to correct these systemic illegalities—declaring former Judge Sérgio Moro’s bias in 2021, recognizing the lack of jurisdiction of the 13th Federal Court of Curitiba, and overturning mass convictions—the institutional and human damage had already been done. People had been unjustly imprisoned, reputations were irreversibly destroyed, and, even more seriously, Brazilian society had been numbed and conditioned to accept the violation of rights in the name of fighting corruption. The STF’s initial inaction allowed “lawfare” to become normalized in the country and a punitive media culture to take root in the collective imagination.
Structural Explanation
The fundamental difference between the two courts lies in their institutional design, and this is where the roots of Brazil’s “celebrity culture” lie. The U.S. Supreme Court deliberates behind closed doors. The nine justices meet in private conference, debate among themselves, negotiate positions, and produce a majority opinion that represents the voice of the Court as an institution. Dissenting opinions exist, but they are a well-founded exception, not a performative rule. The model favors impersonality: the average citizen is unlikely to know the names of more than two or three justices.
The STF operates according to a diametrically opposed logic. The live broadcast of sessions on TV Justiça, implemented in 2002, has created a system of perverse incentives. Justices do not deliberate to convince their peers, but rather for the camera, targeting the general public, the press, and, increasingly, their social media followings. Votes that could be objective and succinct turn into long, exhaustively read academic exposés, with no argument engaging with another. As Professor Miguel Gualano de Godoy observed: “No one persuades anyone. No argument connects with another.” Justice Alexandre de Moraes himself has already stated in plenary: “I am compelled to make this statement, not least for the sake of the people watching us both here and on TV Justiça,” an involuntary admission that the external audience dictates internal deliberation.
Furthermore, the STF has a jurisdictional structure that structurally favors the power of individual justices. The reporting justice acts as an autonomous decision-making body, capable of issuing single-judge injunctions that paralyze public policies for years without plenary review, and of scheduling or shelving cases according to his or her own calendar.
The disparity in numbers reinforces this assessment. While the U.S. Supreme Court hears approximately 80 cases per year in a collegial setting, the STF issues about 90,000 decisions annually, of which between 80% and 85% are decided by a single justice without any deliberation among peers. This volume is not merely a consequence of the workload; it is also a cause of individualization, as it justifies the delegation of power that, in practice, eliminates collegiality.
There is, however, one aspect that cannot be attributed solely to the institutional framework: the ministers’ own voluntary exposure. It is one thing that the structural form of the Brazilian judicial system and politics inevitably exposes them to issues of intense social debate; it is quite another—and very different—to make a personal choice to appear constantly on television expressing opinions, corresponding with journalists both on and off the record, and fostering a close relationship with the press that is inconsistent with their judicial role. If the justices complain about society’s negative perception of them, they should also exercise greater restraint in their public exposure. Lectures and academic seminars are welcome, as these are legal settings where the presence of judges is natural and expected. But frequent appearances on television programs and constant contact with journalists—whether to preempt positions or influence narratives—go beyond the typical duties of a judge and trivialize the image of the judiciary.
Institutional Implications
We need to put the issue of public approval into context. Recent polls show that confidence in the Supreme Court has reached historically low levels, with 75% of the population stating that justices have “too much power.” It turns out that this phenomenon is not unique to the judiciary: all Brazilian institutions—the press, the executive branch, the legislative branch, and the armed forces—are going through a period of widespread discredit. The essential difference, however, is that the executive and legislative branches must seek public approval, as their legitimacy derives from the vote. Not so for the judiciary. Its legitimacy rests on the Constitution, on technical expertise, and on impartiality. A court that is concerned with approval ratings has already lost sight of its raison d’être.
What *The Economist* observes in the U.S. Supreme Court is the early stage of a disease that has already become chronic in the Brazilian Supreme Court. When judges behave like celebrities or political actors, guided by public outcry rather than the Constitution—as occurred at the height of Operation Car Wash—constitutional jurisdiction loses its primary anchor of legitimacy: impartiality and the guarantee of fundamental rights. Transparency, when distorted into a spectacle, degenerates into the tyranny of the majority and judicial populism.
A clear sign of this political interference is the fact that the Federal Senate is beginning to turn its attention to the Supreme Court with ambitions that go beyond its constitutional role as a mere approving body. In practice, the Senate intends to start selecting Supreme Court justices, thereby reversing the constitutional logic under which nomination is the prerogative of the President of the Republic, while the Senate is responsible only for verifying the requirements of outstanding legal knowledge and an unblemished reputation. The case of Attorney General Jorge Messias is emblematic: his nomination, made in November 2025, was deliberately blocked without any finding of failure to meet constitutional requirements. The rejection was not based on any lack of legal expertise or blemish on the nominee’s reputation, but on a political calculation that reveals the hijacking of the appointment process by partisan logic.
It is imperative to recognize, however, the context of thematic overload in which the Court operates. Over the past 15 years, the STF has been called upon to rule on issues that are extremely relevant, contentious, and of great social impact. In addition to the Mensalão scandal, Operation Car Wash, the decriminalization of marijuana possession, budget amendments, and the response to the attempted coup d’état, the Court addressed the recognition of same-sex civil unions in 2011 and same-sex marriage in 2013, preempting a legislature that refused to address the issue. It declared racial quotas in universities constitutional in 2012, deeply dividing public opinion and the academic community. It authorized the termination of pregnancy in cases of anencephaly that same year, facing strong opposition from religious groups.
He rejected the proposal for a deadline for indigenous land claims in 2023, sparking an open conflict with Congress, which passed a law to the contrary. He banned corporate financing of election campaigns in 2015, changing the rules of the political game. He changed his position twice on imprisonment following a conviction in the appellate court, in 2016 and 2019, causing a huge public outcry because it directly involved the Lula case. And he ordered the suspension of X/Twitter in Brazil in 2024, in a unilateral decision that sparked a global debate on freedom of expression and the individual power of ministers.
The U.S. Supreme Court, for its part, also faced equally explosive issues. In 2022, it overturned Roe v. Wade in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after nearly half a century, in the most polarizing decision in decades. That same week, it drastically expanded the right to bear arms in New York State Rifle v. Bruen, invalidating century-old restrictive state laws. In 2015, it legalized same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges, with strong conservative dissent. In 2023, it banned the use of race as a criterion in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, reversing decades of affirmative action. It granted broad presidential immunity for official acts in Trump v. United States (2024), in a decision seen as direct protection for the former president in his criminal proceedings. It allowed service providers to refuse to serve same-sex couples on religious grounds in 303 Creative v. Elenis (2023). And it blocked Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan in Biden v. Nebraska (2023), directly affecting 40 million Americans.
The parallel is revealing. In both Brazil and the United States, the Constitutional Court is called upon to rule on abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, affirmative action, public safety, the limits of executive power, and freedom of expression. The difference is that in the U.S., the Court acts with institutional discretion even when ruling on explosive issues, whereas in Brazil, the combination of TV Justiça, social media, and single-judge decisions turns every ruling into a personalized media event. The deterioration of the relationship between the executive and legislative branches has forced the judiciary to frequently act as an arbiter between the branches, which naturally increases its exposure and political vulnerability.
In this scenario, there is no point in stoking public pressure to force the STF to adopt codes of conduct or rush through reforms. Internal oversight of the STF must be carried out by the Court itself, which understands better than anyone the sensitivities and complexities of its institutional workings and will be able to create more effective checks and balances without interference from public outcry. At the same time, if the Legislature believes that certain behaviors and exposures should be avoided within the Judiciary, it is up to it to exercise the power granted to it by the Constitution and regulate the matter through legislation.
Ultimately, if society wants a judiciary that is more restrained and less media-driven, the first step is to prevent political crises and moral issues from systematically reaching the Supreme Court. Until politics resolves its own impasses, the Court will continue to serve as a stage for personal branding and judicial spectacle, reflecting not only the vanity of its members but also the dysfunctionality of a system that has judicialized politics and politicized the judiciary.
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