Litigância contra o Poder Público: Relatório Final - Fase II

Executive summary

Problem and purpose

The book starts from the exceptional volume of Brazilian lawsuits in which public entities are defendants. It seeks to identify the patterns, institutional causes and consequences of this litigation, place Brazil in international perspective, and formulate reforms that can reduce unnecessary claims without restricting the judicial protection of rights.

Approach

The study combines more than 60 million DataJud records concerning cases involving public entities between January 2020 and April 2025 with descriptive statistics, multivariate models and survival analysis. Its qualitative component comprises 32 interviews with actors from the justice system and public administration. The international comparison covers Germany, Argentina, the United States, France and Mexico. The quantitative models identify conditional associations and relevant heterogeneity rather than direct causal relationships.

Main findings

Even under the most restrictive comparison, Brazil's public-sector litigation rate is nearly seven times the European average. The diagnosis nonetheless rejects any single explanation: filings, outcomes and case duration vary by subject, defendant level of government, jurisdictional level, state capacity and socioeconomic context. The report distinguishes four patterns — rights-access, corrective, corporate and economic, and dispersed litigation — and shows that the mass scale of disputes has not been matched by collective treatment. Fragmented institutional views of the causes coexist with greater agreement on several remedies.

Reform agenda

The proposals are organized into six complementary lines: strengthening the administrative sphere; strategic litigation management; revising incentives for opportunistic use of judicial proceedings; appropriate and consensual dispute resolution; interinstitutional coordination; and consistent decision-making through stable precedent and collective mechanisms. The report stresses that measures should be combined according to the type of litigation and implemented cautiously so as to preserve access to justice and the effective protection of rights.

Contribution

The study provides national empirical evidence for replacing generic diagnoses with differentiated interventions. Its central contribution is to treat litigation against public entities as an expression of Brazil's constitutional model: the same state that sustains access to justice also becomes the target of social, economic and corporate claims. The proposed agenda seeks to improve administrative capacity, prevent disputes and resolve them more effectively without reversing the guarantees built since 1988.