Articles
In his article for Poder360, Fábio Medina Osório – head of Medina Osório Advogados – addresses the urgent need to consolidate the pact between technology, education, and transparency, emphasizing that the State cannot hide behind its own data. Read below:
The analysis of the consolidation of precedent theory in Brazil, in light of the innovations introduced by the 2015 Code of Civil Procedure (CPC), marks a pivotal moment in the pursuit of predictability and rationality within the judicial system.
Since then, judicial decisions have gained binding force, becoming essential references for both public administration and the courts. This implies not only institutional deference but also demands a solid organizational structure anchored in memory and transparency.
The challenge goes beyond the legal domain and extends into structural aspects. The effectiveness of the precedent system requires that the State, across its various spheres and institutions, develop legal databases capable of storing, classifying, interpreting, and connecting a broad range of decisions, rulings, and normative statements.
This need is not limited to the Judiciary but also involves regulatory agencies, audit courts, public prosecutors, and administrative bodies responsible for legally significant decisions.
It is crucial to acknowledge, however, that the administrative sphere remains the weakest link in Brazil’s institutional chain. Despite important initiatives within the Judiciary, most public institutions still lack structured, auditable, and semantically organized databases. As a result, administrative decisions, disciplinary proceedings, legal and extrajudicial agreements, contracts, and the entire universe of disciplinary and sanctioning jurisprudence remain scattered and fragmented, hindering access to institutional memory—memory that should guide State action.
In this context, algorithmic performance becomes fundamental. Today, the organization of precedents depends on systems using legal, semantic, and statistical parameters. Implementing algorithms to categorize them requires a solid regulatory foundation, technical curation, and a data structure that can be audited.
Without these elements, there is a risk that repetition will outweigh coherence, turning automation into a threat to the very essence of judicial reasoning.
Statistics must be understood within the context of AI's impact. Statistics can be classified by various parameters. For reference, we can talk about inferential, predictive, diagnostic, multivariate, frequentist, Bayesian, non-parametric, jurimetric, forensic, social, political, educational, descriptive, explanatory, high-dimensional, and many other types of statistics—depending on the field, such as biostatistics, psychometrics, computational statistics, and so forth.
Legal databases also serve as tools for statistical research integrated with AI, enabling developments across multiple areas and public policy domains. It is well known that normative decisions impact the economy and public policies in numerous spheres of society. Legal interpretation, in this regard, is necessarily transdisciplinary and not limited to economic analysis of law.
Organizing precedents, therefore, means ensuring the right to understanding (the right to understand public decisions derives from the fundamental rights enshrined in Articles 37 caput, 51 item 14, 5 item 60, and 1 item 3 of the Constitution).
Every individual—whether natural or legal—has the right to understand the criteria underlying the public decisions that affect them. This fundamental right to understanding is intrinsically tied to transparency, traceability, and institutional legitimacy, and only materializes when decisions are intelligible, auditable, and aligned with established jurisprudence.
Without well-structured legal databases, there are no real precedents—only a disorganized accumulation of decisions. And where there is accumulation, there is noise, inequality, and arbitrariness, undermining justice and the system’s effectiveness.
A structured legal database emerges as a digital platform capable of storing, classifying, and correlating administrative and judicial decisions, regulations, agreements, and regulatory documents.
Such organization must follow well-defined legal criteria, with strict classifications ensuring traceability and version control. More than preserving records, the database must ensure institutional coherence, enable intelligent queries, support consistent interpretations, and promote decisions aligned with the legal history of institutions and the precedent system.
In this sense, legal databases function as living ecosystems, constantly fed through the normative and judicial indexing of decisions, based on algorithmic logic, metadata, discursive hierarchies, and predefined patterns.
Contemporary statistics, in its many forms, plays a critical role with causal, algorithmic efficacy and deep impacts on how institutions interpret mapped and indexed norms and decisions.
One must not overlook that statistical functionality—when integrated into databases—enables countless features to help comprehend how certain decisions are consolidated as normative patterns and how they affect society. It also allows analysis of deviations, dysfunctions, underlying hermeneutic trends, and other subjective or objective pathologies inherent in decision-making or even algorithmic processes.
AI, in turn, works hand in hand with modern statistics to provide advanced, rapid insights from large datasets. While grounded in statistics, AI has distinct functionalities and integrates into this universe only when it operates under auditable and rationally traceable premises.
Technology, in this regard, will have a profound impact on classification models based on the language of precedents, argumentative similarities, prevailing legal grounds, recognition of argumentative and normative patterns in decisions, detection of frequent contradictions, incongruities, necessary coherence, predictive models, and an extensive array of structures aimed at ensuring predictability, legal certainty, and efficiency in the normative system.
In the age of transparency and complexity, the right to understand public decisions stands out as a fundamental right derived from the principle that prohibits arbitrary public power—a right inherent to substantive due process (Article 5, item 54 of the Constitution).
Publishing decisions in official gazettes is not enough, as these tools do not provide substantial access to the transparency of the collective decisions forming the body of precedent-based norms. Likewise, judicial databases are insufficient because they do not ensure interconnection with other branches of government or the effective application of precedents across the entire Brazilian State.
Furthermore, building precedents also demands cultural development among public and private actors involved in decision-making—a circumstance that requires deeper transformations in Brazilian education and academic research on the jurisprudential process as a whole.
Therefore, it is urgent that law schools, training programs for judges, prosecutors, public defenders, attorneys, and educational institutions—including the Ministry of Education (MEC)—integrate precedent theory as a central axis of the curriculum, including as an autonomous subject rather than a mere appendix to Civil Procedure.
Brazil must abandon its fragmented interpretive tradition and cultivate a legal culture based on institutional memory, argumentative coherence, and collective responsibility. For this, AI must be incorporated into legal education—not as a trendy innovation, but as a tool that supports the rational organization of law, grounded in ethical, epistemological, and normative principles: an auxiliary, auditable intelligence to enhance human intelligence.
Precedent theory must not only be applied—it must be taught, debated, and systematized. To consolidate it, material improvements alone are not enough; cultural transformation is necessary. Structured legal databases should go beyond governmental tools to become platforms for education, research, and critical reconstruction of decision-making practices. By recognizing the right to comprehensible information, the country can develop a robust, ethical, and inclusive public transparency policy.
This endeavor requires more than the adoption of new technologies: it demands curation, training, and a genuine willingness to listen and reflect. Without this awareness, precedents become hollow, decisions isolated, and access to justice turns into an opaque normative maze.
Consolidating the pact between technology, education, and transparency is urgent. The State cannot hide behind its own data—it must organize, explain, and share it. That is the essence of institutional legitimacy in the 21st century.
In this sense, it is crucial to recognize that access to justice begins with access to the logic of decisions—understandable only when organized in public, coherent, and accessible databases, and taught from the outset of legal education. Promoting a culture of precedents, therefore, becomes a public policy aimed at institutional integrity. Without this foundation, rights remain out of reach, and justice remains incomprehensible.
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