Lewandowski and professors launch book on law and media – 02/24/2023 – Politics

The relationship between law and the media is the central theme of the book “Law, Media and Freedom of Expression: Costs of Democracy”, organized by professors at the Faculty of Law of USP Ricardo Lewandowski, Minister of the STF (Federal Supreme Court); Heleno Torres and Pierpaolo Cruz Bottini.

Published by Quartier Latin, the work is a collection of articles by professors who participated in a discipline on the subject taught to graduate students in 2020.

“The collective work brings together works by several authors who reflect on the correlation between freedom of expression and democracy today”, summarizes Lewandowski.

Bottini adds that the book is the result of a semester of debates at a historical moment in the country in which freedom of expression was curtailed by the government and by virtual militias.

“It is a legal work with a political character, because it deals with controversial issues and proposes strategies to ensure the right, within legal limits.”

In the book’s introductory text, the three organizers state that the media’s interest in the Judiciary strengthens transparency, but criticize the risk of distortions based on a superficial analysis of decisions.

“Public opinion often follows emotional or immediate guidelines, different from time and the criteria of law, and often requires simplistic or short-term responses that antagonize legal precepts or constitutional guarantees.”

The professors state that such role “encourages populist postures of certain judicial agents, who, in their eagerness to respond or to take advantage of the wave of demands, recognize in legality an obstacle to the realization of what they believe to be ‘Justice’ and launch themselves into activism dangerous for a system founded on the salutary chains of legality”.

Among the topics discussed in the book are the foundations of democracy, limits to freedom of expression, judicial harassment against journalists, the right to be forgotten and the use of the now extinct national security law.

In the first chapter, STF Minister Dias Toffoli writes about the role of the Judiciary in the face of so-called fake news and the inquiry conducted in court on the subject, which he set up ex officio in 2019, when he presided over the Supreme Court.

The investigation was opened as a Supreme Court response to attacks suffered by ministers on social media, without provocation by the PGR (Attorney General of the Republic). The investigation was questioned by jurists, but gained support and ended up endorsed by the court in 2020, in the face of attacks by former president Jair Bolsonaro (PL) against members of the court.