Ruling Racial Quotas Constitutional in Brazil

Silvio Luiz de Almeida is a Brazilian attorney and professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in Sao Paulo. As the Honorary President of the Luiz Gama Institute, he has played a key public role in legal debates surrounding Brazilian legislation on racism and anti-discrimination. Almeida is the author of the seminal Racismo Estrutural (2019) as well as Sartre: Direito e Política (2016) and O Direito no Jovem Lukács (2006). Travis Knoll is an independent scholar and social entrepreneur. His investigations into social mobility and access to higher education included service as manager of a 2017–2018 Duke Bass Connections on the Cost of Opportunity? Higher Education in the Baixada Fluminense. His forthcoming monograph is entitled A Revolution of the Book: Black Catholic Movements in Brazil's Affirmative Action Campaign. John D. French is a Duke University Professor of History and African American Studies who specializes in modern Brazilian and Latin America. He has published two monographs on Brazil (1992, 2004) and co-edited The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers (1997). Lula and His Politics of Cunning, his 2020 biography of Brazil's President, won both the Warren Dean and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda book prizes. Waleska Miguel Batista is a Brazilian attorney and specialist in anti-discrimination compliance. She is Professor of Law in the School of Humanities, Social and Legal Sciences at Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas (PUC-Campinas) and the Director of Communication at Instituto Luiz Gama (Human Rights Institute), São Paulo, Brazil. Thaís Duarte Zappelini is a Brazilian attorney and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois since 2023. She published her first monograph, Liberalismo jurídico: uma discussão sobre Direito e escravidão no Brasil oitocentista in 2025. Zappelini currently works on the Brasillinois Initiative, with research on democratization, affirmative action in higher education, and women's rights.

• Introduction; 1. Contesting racial quotas at Brazil's Supreme Constitutional Court; 2. Debating racial quotas at the STF: understanding the public hearings organized by STF rapporteur Lewandowski; 3. The art of persuasion: Black civil society's winning strategy at the STF public hearings; 4. The Supreme Court decides: racial inequality is a violation of 'material or substantial equality for all'; 5. From dissent to deliberative convergence: explaining STF unanimity and its legislative consequences; 6. What Brazil can teach us: the constitutional and ethical roots of a judicial victory; Conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography; Appendices.