Lawyers and Law Schools in Brazil

Rebeca Duran

Staff Writer
The Brazil Business

Updated

13 February 2014

Brazil has many lawyers, but this is only possible thanks to the enormous number of law schools that have been established in the country. Find out more about Brazilian law schools in the article.

The Country of Lawyers

In 2010, Brazil was ranked as the third country with largest number of lawyers in the world. The second place was occupied by the United States, with more than 1 million professional lawyers, followed by India that has almost 1 million lawyers as well. But how did that happen?

Obviously Brazilians don’t simply love law and all of them don't just want to become lawyers. What really explains this enormous amount of lawyers in the country is the number of law schools on it. The country has more law schools than all of the world's countries' put together.

There are 1,240 graduation courses of Law working in Brazilian lands, while the amount of courses in the world is totaled as 1,100 law schools. The data was announced by the National Council of Justice (CNJ) in 2010.

More Doesn’t Mean Better

The number of registered lawyers in the country - approved by the Brazilian Bar Examination - is 800 thousand, but according to some statistics, if all law students of Brazil were approved in the Examination, the country would account an approximate amount of 3 million professionals.

But all this high data, doesn’t actually mean that all courses developed in Brazil are good, by the contrary, it shows that the country's law courses are getting too big and too many, and some of them aren’t recommendable. Many of them are under Ministry of Education (MEC) supervision because, for last couple of years, there had been unsatisfactory grades in the National Exam of Student Performance (ENADE) and in the Difference Indicator of Expected and Observed Performance (IDD).

When an Educational Institution receives unsatisfactory grades, a Commission of Educational Specialist visited the place and settled on an agreement with the institution in order to promote improvements. The improvements must aim the regularization of the course, according to MEC standards.

• If improvements occur: the course is regulated.
• If the improvements are partially realized: the course must diminishes the number of student vacancies offered by the Educational Institution.
• If the improvements aren’t at all performed: a lawsuit starts aiming to close the course in question.

The Search for Quality

The year of 2014 has just started and the Minister of Education, Aloizio Mercadante, just announced that Ministry will perform inspections in all law courses offered by Universities in Brazil in order to analyze if all of them are properly organized and conducted in accordance with the basic standars of law education.

The measure also aims to diminish the number of law students that aren’t approved by the end of their graduation in the Brazilian Bar Examination. According to the Minister, that happens because many courses aren’t good enough and their students end up graduating without the necessary qualifications required by the Brazilian Bar.

The last Bar Examination ended up with only 14% of candidates approved among the total amount that realized the test. That’s a very serious problem, since, in Brazil, the only way to develop the lawyer profession is by having the Exam approval.

Best Brazilian Law Schools

If on one-hand some national courses are closing doors by the lack of quality, the other institutions have been gaining more visibility as the best law courses of Brazil. The 2013 University Rank of Folha de São Paulo (RUF 2013), elected the top ten Brazilian law schools. The universities were evaluated according to the quality of their education.