The internal laws of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and the necessity of its revision

• Grant number: 17/05586-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2017
• End date: September 30, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Law - Public Law
• Principal Investigator: Elival da Silva Ramos
• Grantee: Arthur Paku Ottolini Balbani
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Direito (FD). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Written in 1989, the Chamber of Deputies' Internal Rule is the most important document to both the good development of the House activities and to its own operation. Also, in this text it is found not only administrative rules, but also all the directives and procedures concerning the legislative process. As any piece of law, one may expect that the Internal Rules are well written, without unconstitutionalities, contradictions or significant gaps. However, all of these three items are observed in the Chamber of Deputies' Internal Rules: even after several amendments, there was not a single effort to review the document in its whole, trying to solve all the mentioned problems and to adequate the text to the current days. There are three steps that one needs to take to analyze this document. First, it is necessary to identify the most important subjects in the text. Second, these big themes shall be compared to both the Constitution, the other articles and subjects in the Internal Laws, the doctrine and, finally, to the decisions of the Supreme Court (in this case, the Supremo Tribunal Federal). Third, after this comparative analysis, the choice of what seems to be most correct hypothesis, among those that arose in the second item. This research proposes an analysis on the Chamber of Deputies' Internal Rule in order to find its vicissitudes - unconstitutionalities or just incongruences - and, after that, propose suggestions to improve the text, aiming that this could be used by the legislators to modify it. (AU)