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By Glênio S Guedes ( Brazilian Attorney-at-Law ) Some events behave like cultural seismographs. They don’t cause earthquakes; they register them—tiny tremors already traveling through the bedrock of intellectual life. An administrative directive instructing a university professor to remove Plato from a course at Texas A&M is one such reading. This is not a clerical hiccup or a local syllabus squabble. It is a civilizational symptom. Which raises the uncomfortable question rig

“It is not law that restrains power. It is power that decides when law counts.” By Glênio S Guedes ( Brazilian Attorney-at-law ) Let’s start with the uncomfortable question. The kind you don’t ask at dinner. Can hypocrisy become a legal institution? Not a moral flaw. Not an accident. A feature. Look around. The answer is already filed, stamped, and classified. Under the leadership of Donald Trump , the United States didn’t merely break international law. That would be boring.

“What separates war from murder is the law.” — Former attorney of the United States Army By Glênio S Guedes ( Brazilian Attorney-at-Law) There are illegitimate governments. There are authoritarian regimes. There are stolen elections, systematic repression, forced exiles, and States captured by forms of power no longer aligned with the public good. None of this, however, authorizes the suspension of law as the standard by which state action is judged—especially when the State

"While men discussed politics in Rio de Janeiro cafés, a woman in Paris decided the fate of railroads in China and mines in Canada."   By Glenio S Guedes (Attorney)   Introduction: The Silent Vanguard Global financial history is often narrated as a succession of notable men, from J.P. Morgan to Warren Buffett. However, decades before Benjamin Graham systematized "value investing" in Columbia classrooms, a Brazilian woman applied these concepts intuitively, with a rigor and sc

By Glênio S Guedes The Dangerous Role of the Bad Scientist in a Democratic Society For a long time, it was widely assumed that the greatest threat to democracy was ignorance. Merchants of Doubt , by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, forces us to revise that comfortable belief. The more serious danger is not ignorance itself, but misguided knowledge armed with authority . The central figure in this new landscape is not the confused layperson, but the displaced expert: the scienti

By Glênio S Guedes 1. Introduction – Tax Planning under Permanent Suspicion Tax planning in Brazil exists within a structural paradox. On the one hand, it is traditionally recognized—both by classical legal scholarship and by the Constitution itself—as a legitimate exercise of private autonomy and economic freedom. On the other, it is frequently portrayed in administrative practice and judicial rhetoric as an inherently suspect activity, often treated as a disguised form of f

By Glênio S. Guedes The foundational schism separating the Civil Law and Common Law traditions—the distinction between codified statute and binding judicial precedent—is often treated as a matter of mere technique. Yet, as Mirjan Damaska brilliantly articulated in The Faces of Justice and State Authority , the true divergence lies in the contrasting ideal types  of state authority and judicial structure each system embodies. Understanding this distinction is crucial for asses

Glênio S Guedes ( Rechtsanwalt in Brasilien) « Die Sprache Europas ist die Übersetzung » — Umberto Eco Art. 4, Bundesverfassung der Schweizerischen Eidgenossenschaft (1999): Die Landessprachen sind Deutsch, Französisch, Italienisch und Rätoromanisch. 1. Die Verfassung als sprachlicher Gesellschaftsvertrag Artikel 4 der Bundesverfassung ist kein symbolisches Ornament, sondern das operative Zeichen einer politischen Ethik . Indem sie vier Landessprachen anerkennt, bekräftigt di

By Glênio Sabbad Guedes (Lawyer in Brazil) “Non ex regula ius sumatur, sed ex iure quod est regula fiat.” (Paulus, Digest 50.17.1) “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.,   The Common Law , 1881)* At the dawn of every legal civilization, there is a familiar scene: a man seeking justice, another resisting it, and a third — the jurist or the judge — trying to decide without breaking the fragile balance of the world. This wa

Or How to Build a Crime Syndicate by Following Stephen Hawking’s Advice By Glênio S Guedes ( lawyer in Brazil ) “If aliens ever visit us, the outcome may resemble the arrival of Columbus in the Americas. It didn’t go well for the natives.”— Stephen Hawking, physicist, prophet, and part-time Latin American political analyst. Welcome to the Americas, that corner of the galaxy where absurdity is not a symptom but an economic policy. Here, reality doesn’t just outpace fiction—it

Glênio Sabbad Guedes, Lawyer in Brazil   There was a dawn — October 28th, 2025 — when Brazil once again looked into the mirror of fear. The “Operação Contenção” , carried out in Rio de Janeiro’s Penha and Alemão complexes, left more than a hundred dead and a nation paralyzed between horror and déjà vu. Once again, the Brazilian State tried to reclaim control over crime through weapons — and lost it through words. Because this is not only a war fought in the streets. It is a w

By Glênio Sabbad Guedes, lawyer in Brazil 1. Between Order and Innovation China today represents one of the most intricate legal and economic architectures in the modern world: a centralized state that merges political control with commercial openness, socialist planning with global competition. Law, in this context, is not merely a regulatory instrument—it is an instrument of strategic governance , shaping the equilibrium between stability, prosperity, and authority. The Peo

By Glênio Sabbad Guedes, lawyer in Brazil 1. Between the Desert and the Law Few nations illustrate the creative marriage between political vision and legal engineering as vividly as the United Arab Emirates. In scarcely half a century, the federation transformed itself from a collection of oil-dependent sheikhdoms into a modern polity governed by law—an institutional experiment that blends stability, openness, and reasoned normativity. What makes the UAE remarkable is not mer

By Glênio Sabbad Guedes ( lawyer ) “This process of ‘creative destruction’ constitutes the essential fact about capitalism. It is in this process that capitalism consists and every capitalist enterprise has to adapt itself to it, willingly or not.” — Joseph A. Schumpeter, cited in Luc Ferry, The Creative Destruction of the Modern World  (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2015, p. 20). 1. Introduction: The Nobel that Celebrates Destruction The 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics honored thr

By Glênio Sabbad Guedes “Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.” All men by nature desire to know. — Aristotle, Metaphysics , Book...