About me
My research investigates election law and constitutional law from a comparative perspective, linking these areas to questions about political representation, corruption, and institutional design. I draw on contexts too often left at the margins of a literature built largely on Global North cases, taking the constitutional and electoral experience of the Global South seriously. A further strand of my work examines the relationship between antimonopoly law and democracy, asking how competition law shapes, and is shaped by, the distribution of corporate and political power.
I hold a PhD in Law from King’s College London, supervised by Professor Keith Ewing, and a Master of Laws (LLM) from the University of California, Berkeley. I have held postdoctoral fellowships as a Fapesp Fellow at the University of São Paulo (USP) School of Law and as a Hauser Global Fellow at New York University (NYU) School of Law and, most recently, a Visiting Scholar position at Melbourne Law School.
Before entering full‑time academic research I worked in corporate legal practice in São Paulo, latterly as a partner and head of a competition law team advising major Brazilian and multinational businesses.
Current research projects
Handbook
Handbook
Comparative election law
Monograph
How should elected politicians behave?
Conceptualising political representation in comparative public law
Article
Australian anti‑corruption law in comparative perspective
With Associate Professor Yee-Fui Ng, Monash University
Article
Proportionality in electoral law
With Michele Zezza
Article
The stream‑of‑benefits approach to bribery in political finance
Article
Democratic theories in political finance adjudication
Harvest project, funded by NextGenerationEU · for a special issue of the Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law
Chapter
The disqualification of Jair Bolsonaro
In Eleonora Bottini and Eugene Mazo (eds), Judging Democracy: The Role of Courts in Disqualifying Candidates and Annulling ElectionsMain publications
- 2026 ‘The Blind Spot of Liberal Democracy: The Constitutional Limits for Assessing Bribery in Political Finance and How It Reinforces Wealth‑Based Power’King’s Law Journal · forthcoming
- 2025 ‘Campaign Finance’Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law 1–20 · Oxford University Press
- 2024 ‘Um País Refém do Conceito de Crime de Corrupção e de Sua Prova’Revista Direito GV 20 · 1–30
- 2024 ‘A Lava Jato, o Financiamento da Política e a Crise da Democracia Constitucional’Revista Brasileira de Estudos Políticos 129 · 357–392
- 2021 ‘Political Influence on Brazilian Antitrust Enforcement’Journal of Antitrust Enforcement 9 · 78–108 · Oxford University Press
- 2021 ‘Shaping Antimonopoly Legislation? The Lobbying of Business Elites in Brazil’Revista Nomos 41 · 295–312
- 2017 ‘The Brazilian Supreme Court’s ADI 4650 Decision: A Step Towards the End of Plutocracy?’King’s Law Journal 28 · 167–172
- 2016 ‘Party Funding, Competition Law and the Protection of Political Democracy’Queen Mary Law Journal 7 · 79–94
I also write for broader audiences on democracy, political finance and antimonopoly law, including for Folha de S.Paulo, Nexo Jornal and the TRAFO Blog for Transregional Research.
Teaching
I have taught constitutional law, the law of democracy, business law and competition law, at undergraduate, postgraduate and professional levels.
- Constitutional Law and the Law of DemocracyDesigned and delivered for electoral judges and court staff · School of the Brazilian Electoral Judiciary
- Constitutional LawUndergraduate seminars · University of São Paulo
- Business Law and Competition LawLectures and seminars · Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo
- Political Finance in Comparative PerspectiveGuest lecture, Corruption and Democratic Integrity · Melbourne Law Masters, University of Melbourne
Formal teaching training: ‘Preparing to Teach in Higher Education’, King’s College London, covering curriculum design, assessment, feedback and evidence‑based method.
Past research projects
Research
Bribery and the legitimate political donation
Brazilian courts confronted this boundary at scale through the Lava Jato prosecutions, with consequences for political rights and for the standing of the institutions doing the judging. The project examined how judges organise the concepts available to them: quid pro quo corruption, corruption by dependence, and the corruption of electoral competition itself, and how they weigh the effects of each on constitutional resilience.
Postdoctoral project, University of São Paulo · Fapesp Foundation Fellowship · with Virgílio Afonso da Silva
Research
Courts, political finance and the contours of democracy
The line between a gift and a bribe has occupied United States courts and constitutional argument since the 1970s, and Brazilian judges have drawn on that jurisprudence, though unsystematically. This project placed the two experiences beside one another to ask what each reveals about the other.
New York University (NYU) School of Law · with Richard Pildes and Samuel Issacharoff · Fapesp Foundation Fellowship
Reference
Campaign finance in comparative constitutional law
Commissioned by Oxford University Press to write the campaign finance entry for the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law, covering the regulation of party and electoral funding across constitutional systems.
Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law · Oxford University Press · published 2025
Doctoral
The Brazilian law of democracy and its implications for competition law
Two questions ran through this project. First, how rules governing political competition, and political finance in particular, shape the construction of other fields of law, traced through both the drafting of Brazilian competition legislation and its enforcement by the competition authority. Second, what a normative account of political finance looks like when it is treated as one element of political competition alongside the ownership of media.
King’s College London · supervised by Keith Ewing and Christopher Townley · Capes Foundation scholarship