Project brings together professionals and academics from BRICS countries to produce knowledge about legal systems across the bloc

In 2030, the bloc composed of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will account for more than half of the global economy, according to projections. Despite this, there has been little academic output in Brazil to help regulators and legal professionals understand the real differences and similarities across these countries’ legal systems, as well as the risks and opportunities arising from growing economic and political cooperation between them.

To help fill this gap, this year the FGV´s Sao Paulo Law School launched the BRICS Law Project, a set of initiatives encompassing education, research and extension activities, aimed at promoting the development of legal knowledge about these countries’ legal systems and creating opportunities for professionals and academics across the bloc to share their experiences. The idea is to educate and train Brazilian professionals to understand the legal and institutional environments in these countries and enable them to act as mediators between their respective systems and Brazilian law, besides proposing public and private sector solutions to existing regulatory and business challenges.

“There are many issues that people haven’t even attempted to respond to,” say professors Thiago Reis and André Corrêa, the project’s coordinators at the FGV´s Sao Paulo Law School. Examples of these issues include the way the BRICS countries’ legal systems respond to the challenges posed by globalization and growing demand for domestic economic development, as well as common problems facing these countries.

The project, designed in 2018 following a visit to four Chinese law schools in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan, will bring together regulators, companies, law firms and academics in a discussion forum to answer these questions based on studies of concrete problems of major social and economic importance. Earlier this year, the FGV´s Sao Paulo Law School held its first bilateral meeting with Beijing Normal University and it is preparing for its second meeting, which will take place in early December in Beijing. On October 21 and 22, the school will also host its first bilateral meeting with O.P. Jindal Global University / University of Delhi.

In addition to bilateral meetings, the FGV´s Sao Paulo Law School is running a BRICS Private Law module for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as representatives of organizations that support the project, who will bring their professional perspectives to the debate. This module will include workshops open to the public, featuring representatives of each BRICS country, to seek closer links in the field of private law through comparative studies of four key areas – property, contracts, responsibility and family – and their interfaces with challenges related to social organization and economic development.