He helped Lula overturn a graft conviction stemming from Brazil’s sprawling “Car Wash” corruption investigation, getting him freed after 580 days of incarceration. The Supreme Court annulled all convictions of Lula, and ruled in 2021 that the judge overseeing the case had been biased. That allowed Lula to run successfuly for his third, non-consecutive presidential term.
In July, senators examining Zanin’s appointment questioned the lawyer about his ability to remain nonpartisan. A large majority of senators went on to vote in favor of his nomination, making the 47-year-old the youngest justice on the 11-member court.
Lula, who in March called Zanin “his friend” on radio BandNews FM, pedalled back in a later interview. “He was not a friend, he was my lawyer,” Lula told Record TV in July after Zanin’s appointment had been approved by the Senate. “He is an extremely capable person … He is very studious, he is very competent, he is very dedicated and he is very serious. This is the reason why he was chosen.”
All these people come out of the same schools and get the same clerking gigs and work at the same white shoe law firms and federal agencies before being repped by a handful of Judiciary Committee Senators to move through a small set of Federal benches. They’re all interchangeably meritable. You won’t find one notably more qualified than the others, by any metric shy of “Did you get a gold star from the ACLU or the Federalist Society? (or their Brazilian equivalents)”
There’s a native prejudice in the appointment process that leans towards prosecutors, because the state values prosecutors more highly than defense attorneys. DAs go on to be AGs go on to be Senators and Ministry/Department of Justice cabinet positions. And from there, they can break into the Federal Bench. Pro Bono defense attorneys aren’t on this track. Criminal attorneys rarely, if ever, get the kind of recognition that prosecutors routinely receive.
How much would have to change in order for a selection process predicated on “merit”?
We’re at a point in which a nationally recognized and respected defense attorney who has regularly argued in front of the highest appellate courts and won landmark cases isn’t qualified to join those judges. How? Why? What are you even using to evaluate these professionals?
It seems as though being a defense attorney is the disqualifying factor. That’s not any kind of meritocracy I recognize.
You came up with your own kind of selection process and you don’t accept it. I can’t argue with that…
I’m presenting hypothetical criteria to demonstrate the problem with an implementation of meritocracy. Merit isn’t an objective measure. It is necessarily in the eye of the beholder.