Fabio de Sa e Silva is Associate Professor of International Studies and Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma and an affiliated fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession.
Fabio has a multidisciplinary background with training in law, social sciences, and public policy. He also brings to OU a diversified professional experience, with over 15 years of experience in policy making and analysis in issues of law and justice in Brazil, where he served at the Ministry of Justice and the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) and consulted for international organizations like the UNDP, Unesco and the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI).
Fabio is the author of high-impact studies on law, lawyers, and democracy. His article From Carwash to Bolsonaro examines the “political grammar” produced and disseminated by Brazilian legal officers through the lava jato anticorruption initiative. This article received extensive media coverage in Brazil and became the most-cited and most-downloaded article in the Journal of Law and Society for the year 2020. His article Relational Legal Consciousness and Anticorruption maps the cultural schemata coproduced through interactions between the prosecutors ahead of lava jato and their followers on Facebook. This article was the topic of a full-page interview at the Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo and won the Law & Society Association’s best article award in 2022.
Currently, Fabio is one of the conveners of the Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL), an LSA International Research Collaborative that is designing comparative research on how rising autocrats in Brazil, India and South Africa use law to amass power and what can be done to stop their moves. In this capacity, he also hosts the PAL Cast, a podcast series where he interviews lead scholars on law and (un)democratic politics.
Fabio is also an institution builder. He co-directs the OU Center for Brazil Studies, is the Vice President-elect of the Brazilian Studies Association, and a Trustee of the Law and Society Association (LSA), Class of 2023. In 2018, he was recognized as the Outstanding Faculty at the Department.
Fabio is frequently sought after by the media to comment on Brazilian affairs. His latest appearances include outlets such as BBC News, the Washington Post, Radio France International, The Intercept, and The World; in addition to Brazilian vehicles such as Rede TV, Folha de São Paulo, UOL, The Intercept Brasil, Correio Braziliense, and O Globo.
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