Abstract
This article analyses the case-law of the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF) in relation to the policies for the prevention and treatment of Covid-19. With the support of data science and artificial intelligence, the STF´s decisions were systematically and exhaustively collected. These decisions were organized and classified into the following topics: social distancing, miscellaneous responses to Covid-19, face covering, requisition of private property, ICU beds, vaccination, and access to information. The organization and analysis of 253 judgments allow us to draw, with nuance and in detail, the following conclusions: an important share of the STF´s decisions was preliminary injunctions and made by a single Justice, the Court sought to protect the capacity of local governments to respond to the pandemic, some decisions show a critical attitude of the Court in relation to the federal government, in many cases there is an explicit overlap between the formal assessment of which federal entity (the federal government, state governments or municipal governments) has the authority to decide an issue and the substantive analysis of which policy should be implemented, and the STF has been hesitant to order complex measures for responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Keywords
Supreme Federal Court; Covid-19; social distancing; vaccine; data science