Law, Taxation and the Economy in Brazil : An Appraisal from the Perpsective of the Legal Analysis of Economic Policy (in Portuguese)

In Brazilian tax law there are perceptible tensions between what can be considered “legal” and what must be treated as “economic”. Some older views remain against the incorporation of economic considerations into legal discourse. More recently legal scholars have suggested that legal analysis must adhere to economic analysis based on presuppositions taken from neo-classical economic thought. For lawyers confronted with tax policy issues in Brazil and with the need of society to find a path that will lead to prosperity, economic justice and social peace, what should the most valuable criteria for analysis and decision be? Economic or legal? The paper focuses on some issues in Brazilian tax law to explore possible answers to this question and, by advancing beyond the legacies of the old legal formalism and beyond the strictures of neo-classical presuppositions, it suggests ways to seek a new middle ground between the two (legal and economic) perspectives