Source: Last Instance - São Paulo / SP - 18/06/2010

After going through three decades and having served two distinct constitutional orders, the Civil Procedure Code is subject to legislative reform. Despite the holding of public hearings by the commission of lawyers in charge of preparing it, the effective debate on the proposals will now take place, with the text being made available, whose initial reading refers to the dialogue of the process with the other branches of law, in particular the constitutional and the civil.

Endowed with a cohesive, systemic structure and of recognized technique, the CPC of 1973 was the object of several legislative changes since the 1990s. It is undeniable to recognize its disfiguration. Add the new 1988 constitutional order: perhaps it was already necessary to edit another procedural code that could fulfill the constitutional promise of wide access and the protection of due legal process, values ​​inherent to the Social and Democratic State of Law.

It is a common mistake to think that speed and legal certainty are opposite values. A speedy process is not one that brings legal certainty, nor a process that favors it is, therefore, time consuming. The causes of non-payment have another address, other than that of prestige, is legal certainty.

Hence, one of the vectors of the reform can be seen under the influence of other premises.

If, on the one hand, procedural reform corrects imperfections in the system, and also unifies conflicting jurisprudential positions, such as its great merit, on the other hand - and eventually, its main flaw - it has not adopted investigative parameters of the causes of its inefficiency. In this line of thinking, instead of attacking the causes, the effects were focused. For this reason, the Reform of the Judiciary should precede that of the civil process.

By valuing and encouraging alternative means of resolving controversies, the reformist proposal reaffirms the expectation of the process's precocious purpose of social pacification. Also praiseworthy are the jurisprudential consolidation mechanisms provided for in the preliminary draft, the results of which reflect beyond the law and consolidate, at the international level, Brazil's satisfactory position in economic and commercial aspects.

It is necessary that the reformist undertaking of the Civil Procedure can now be added to other related reforms, such as that of the Judiciary. Without reforming the Judiciary, the procedural changes will be momentary and insufficient, as it is said of those who care more about the skin than about the fruit itself.