The Washington Foreign Law Society
is pleased to support the
Doing Business in Brazil Legal Symposium
Date: August 24-25, 2026
Venue: Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.
Register here
Academic event that addresses legal issues of central interest to foreign investors who wish to undertake direct investments in Brazil.
Now in its third edition, the Doing Business in Brazil Legal Symposium gathers justices, regulators, academics, and practitioners from Brazil, the United States, and multilateral organizations for two days of discussion aimed at drawing functional comparisons in service of the legal problems businesses face in their cross-border operations.
The opening day turns to the machinery of bilateral trade at a moment of global realignment, then to a question long overdue for scrutiny: what happens when a civil law country borrows the vocabulary of stare decisis without the interpretive toolkit that gives American precedent its coherence? From there, delegates will examine Brazil's new mandatory Emissions Trading System against the EU and U.S. experience, the classification battles reshaping gig work on both continents, and Brazil's debate over how to classify and regulate prediction markets, measured against the American experience.
Day two turns from markets to institutions. Panels will confront the infiltration of organized crime into licit supply chains, the contours of Brazilian public policy as a ground for refusing foreign arbitral awards, and the new corporate tax enforcement regime under Complementary Law 225/2026; read alongside the American experience of punishing strategic default without foreclosing legitimate restructuring. Health coverage litigation after ADI 7265; standard-essential-patent disputes that have turned courts into de facto technology regulators; and a closing comparison of the Supremo Tribunal Federal's and the U.S. Supreme Court's growing role in structural, long-horizon litigation, bringing participants back to the two courts whose kinship opened this story, and whose diverging paths still have much to teach each other.