Why would a poor and largely pro-developmental country such as Brazil, that has so much of its territory covered in forest, adopt one of the most restrictive land use requirements in the world when it comes to cutting the forest to give way to other economic uses? We describe the evolution of...

We use NOMINATE (Nominal Three Step Estimation) (Poole and Rosenthal, 1983, 1997) to estimate ideal points for all Supreme Court Justices in Brazil from 2002 to 2012. Based on these estimated preferences we identify the nature of the two main dimensions along which disagreements tend to occur in...