Few weeks have been as educational about professional corruption as the last. Maybe next time.
“Vorcaro’s defense case cited a relationship with another PF operation”; “Toffoli responds to Vorcaro’s defense and takes the case to the STF”; “Document used by Toffoli that has no relation to the sale to BRB, says MPF”; “Toffoli reinforces the protocol for Vorcaro’s defense”; “Toffoli with Master director’s lawyer”.
Toffoli’s ethical offense was no more serious than the last ones. Just more self-explanatory. Absent from these titles, however, is another ethical offense: lawyering. We have learned to be outraged by judicial promiscuity, but we remain silent about lawyer promiscuity.
The Code of Ethics of the Brazilian Bar Association provides that the lawyer subordinates “his private ministry to the high public role he exercises”, that he has duties to “preserve the honor, nobility and dignity of the profession”, to act with “decorum”, to “contribute to the improvement of institutions”, and, get this, to refrain from “using undue influence, for his benefit or that of the client”. Who didn’t understand?
What we have learned in recent days is very serious. It’s just not more serious than dozens of other episodes that have become normal in recent years. By any comparative glance, it would be unbelievable. By any measure of professional decency, it would be a public scandal. Complacency limited us to private whispers.
There is a symbiotic relationship between judicial ethical offense and lawyer ethical offense. They are holding hands. The relationship has analytical affinity with the concepts of passive and active corruption. They do not produce legal consequences due to institutional failure. When controllers and controlled share the same interest, the omission deepens a degraded profession.
This surubic and juspornographic imbrication needs to come out of the dark. Magistocracy and lobbyist law are sisters. Quite unique operators of our failure to turn the republican master key — the distinction between public and private.
This is not a comment on individual lawyers, but on the profession. Her self-interested leniency only undermines her “nobility and dignity.” If law has a public function, these practices suppress it. And they affect non-lobbyist lawyers who see conflict of interest as a limit.
If you want to win a case today, don’t ask how smart, courageous and dedicated your lawyer is. Want to know how much your OAB card is worth.
At this leniency fair, you can pay for: privileged access to a minister’s office; dinners and cocktails with a minister (events that are nicknamed “lecture”, “dialogues about Brazil”); even offering the minister cabins, jet trips, weekends on a yacht or a stay at the Paris château. And remember that, among lobbyist lawyers, relatives of ministers are the most effective route to your interests.
Each has the “broad defense” they can buy.
“These are prerogatives!” “By due process!” “I pray for justice!” Verbiage does not save the legal profession. When used to disguise professional infraction, performative shouting only makes it more ridiculous.
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