Abstract
In the United States, January 6, 2021, became a defining moment. President Donald Trump’s conduct and the lack of consequences have been indelibly etched into the nation’s political memory. In Brazil, January 8, 2023, marked a similar political rupture, but one that sealed former President Jair Bolsonaro’s fate in a very different legal order. Through a comparison of the Unites States Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States and Brazil’s criminal conviction of former President Bolsonaro, this Note demonstrates how two presidential democracies took sharply different paths when confronted with attacks on their constitutional order. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, shaped in the shadow of military dictatorship, gives clear expression to presidential criminal liability and equips its institutions to respond when executive power is used anti-democratically. By contrast, the American constitutional order leaves the limits of executive power to judicial interpretation: where the Supreme Court’s expansive immunity ruling has made criminal liability for presidential misconduct far more difficult to obtain. This Note explores how the United States can learn from Brazil’s framework, by adopting a constitutional amendment that defines presidential criminal liability and helps preserve the separation of powers before executive impunity hardens into constitutional doctrine.
Recommended Citation
Emma Al-Angurli Peltzer,
PRESIDENT OR KING? WHAT THE UNITED STATES CAN LEARN FROM BRAZIL’S CONVICTION OF FORMER PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO,
34 J. L. & Pol'y
303
(2026).
Available at:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp/vol34/iss2/8
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