Controle da vinculação horizontal do precedente judicial: caminhos para a consolidação da segurança jurídica

Abstract

Brazilian Law has, of late, been faced with the phenomenon of common law encroachment, that is, some changes aimed at unifying court remedies have attained relevance in Brazil. Case law has earned greater recognition in order to consolidate legal certainty, in so far as rulings are increasingly based on analogical cases, thus making it indispensable to look into judicial precedent, whose objective is to streamline the creation of a norm and to guide interpretation. To that end, some points of the doctrine require an assessment. In particular, the decision herein was to evaluate its horizontal stare decisis, which binds superior courts to adhere to their own prior understandings in mandatory precedents, especially the STF and the STJ, thus demanding an analysis regarding possible ways of controlling the alteration of the stipulated understanding by the same Court that issued the binding precedent decision. Absence of control leads to the idea of random case law. Hence, it is important to study horizontally binding judicial precedents and their relation to the breadth and scope of legal certainty through control mechanisms.