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In the present work we address the subject of defendant class actions - lawsuits that are filed against a group or class of people. The collective procedure in Brazil has reached a meaningful degree of sophistication, being even considered a model for other civil law countries. Nevertheless, there are no legal provisions concerning defendant class actions. That lack of regulation can be explained by the fact of collective guardianship of rights having first been thought for the collectivity to occupy the plaintiff spot in the procedure; however, sometimes, the admission of defendant class actions might be useful or even necessary - otherwise, the protection of some violated or threatened rights/interests could remain impossible. The court reality already demonstrates that despite the lack of express legal provisions concerning the subject, defendant class actions already exist in practice - v.g., possessive actions filed against undetermined collectivities or motions to set aside judgments of regular class actions. Furthermore, Brazilian defendant class actions hold some similarities with their North American counterparts - which makes the U.S. experience to be a fertile field of studies for those interested in the subject. There are strong arguments for admitting "lege lata" of defendant class actions; yet, future legal ruling will be important to delimit and clarify the incidence of such phenomenon, which - at the current stage of the Brazilian collective procedure micro system - causes several procedural difficulties, especially regarding legitimacy and res judicata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comments on the fundamental principles and guarantees applicable to the civil procedure, focusing on how they have been developed by the bill establishing a New Code of Civil Procedure, currently under congressional scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to establish a relationship between the principle of formal truth and the foundations that uses the Brazilian Superior Court of Justice [Superior Tribunal de Justiça - STJ] to examine the pertinence of special appeals, with emphasis on which are known to be inapplicable to the statement n° 7 of its precedent. The starting point was the identification of common elements between the analysis of the court a quo in the ordinary appellate court, and the one held by the STJ, as to the facts, circumstances and evidence in the judicial proceedings subject to a special appeal. The research methodology emphasized the epistemological basis of the so-called "linguistic overturn" of philosophy or "linguistic turn", which in the case of this study consists of the metaphysics overcoming, solipsism and the rigid division between subject and object of research, furthermore, in this study the ontological, hermeneutic and pragmatic "turns". The research techniques used were intended to present the results of preliminary research and the analysis of the jurisprudence of the STJ based on the notion of normative postulates and a presentation of the results more didactic as possible. As a result, it is expected to demonstrate that the control of special appeal by the STJ is analyzed based on the concept of Standards, from a textual analysis of the jurisprudence of the court judgments. Therefore, the analysis presented in this work contributes to the improvement of the discussion about the correlation of the principle of formal truth with the forms of control of free conviction that motivates the judge in the jurisprudence of the STJ. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]