FIU College of Law Alumnus, Cesar Zucatti Pritsch, JD 15, recently visited FIU College of Law to present his first book “MANUAL DE PRÁTICA DOS PRECEDENTES NO PROCESSO CIVIL E DO TRABALHO” (Practice Manual for Precedents in Civil and Labor Procedure) to Dean Tawia Ansah. He donated one book to FIU College of Law Library, and also shared samples with Associate Dean of International & Graduate Studies Manuel Gomez and with Professor Mathew Mirow. The book was published by LTr, one of the most prestigious publishers in Brazil, and discusses the new Brazilian legislation on binding precedents in light of the common law experience in case-based reasoning. The author was able to enrich the analysis of these new procedural rules thanks to the immersion in the American legal system and hands on learning during the Juris Doctor program at FIU.
Pritsch was already a Brazilian Judge before coming to FIU, acting on a federal trial court of special jurisdiction on labor and employment cases, called “3ª Vara do Trabalho de Canoas” (3rd Labor & Employment Court, in the City of Canoas, Brazil). In 2013 he joined FIU Juris Doctor, focusing especially in the areas of civil procedure, labor and employment law, aiming at producing comparative law scholarship in Brazil. Due to advanced standing credits, he completed the program in four semesters (always in the Dean’s list), in 2015 – magna cum laude. Cesar was also the recipient of the Jackson Lewis LLP Labor & Employment Award 2015.
After graduation, Pritsch has returned to the bench in Brazil and the comparative knowledge acquired at FIU has proven to be essential to his professional activities – in a moment that Brazil adopts binding effects for some types of judicial decisions, drifting away significantly from the paradigm of a civil law system. He advocates changes in the appellate court rules to more effectively reflect this statutory innovation and has lectured and published articles in Brazil on this subject. In the USA, Cesar was recently published in Volume 48, issue 3 of the University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, with the article produced in Professor Mathew Mirow’s comparative law seminar, “THE BRAZILIAN APPELLATE PROCEDURE TROUGH COMMON LAW LENSES: HOW AMERICAN STANDARDS OF REVIEW MAY HELP IMPROVE BRAZILIAN CIVIL PROCEDURE” (available at http://repository.law.miami.edu/umialr/vol48/iss3/5). There is also an upcoming publication of his article “IF ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWS ARE ON THE BOOKS, THEN WHY DO WOMEN NOT SUE? A LOOK INTO THE ALMOST ABSENT GENDER DISCRIMINATION LITIGATION IN BRAZIL”, written during Professor Kerry Stone’s employment discrimination law seminar, which will be published in English and Spanish by the ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law in August, 2018. Pritsch would like to thank all FIU Law administration and faculty, especially Professors Kerry Stone, Mathew Mirow, Manuel Gomez and Elisabeth Foley for their precious guidance.”
