Judicial collaborationism in the guise of “classic separation of powers”

The Brazilian Supreme Court faces the starkest challenge to its authority since the country's transition. The challenge is manifold and includes: traditional court-domesticating package of authoritarian regimes (flooding the court with apologists of the regime, either by expanding the number of seats or by retirement measures); threats of non-compliance; threats of reactions by the legislative body through constitutional amendments; aggressive public speeches against the court's decisions. The corrosion of the court's authority, however, does not spring only from exogenous forces and ideological disagreement, but also from endogenous fractures of ethics and procedures, which are arbitrarily manipulable by individualist actors. The current president of the court has announced that the institution has to rescue the classical separation of powers and help finding agreements. This paper intends to reconstruct these moves and interpret it in light of an idea of judicial collaborationism.