Law No. 13.105/15, which introduced the new Code of Civil Procedure to the legal community last March, is a set of rules intended to bring greater effectiveness and speed to ongoing or upcoming lawsuits.
In a country whose Judiciary is responsible for analyzing nearly one hundred million lawsuits, this is a hopeful and promising scenario. It is true that much of what is presented in the new code will be the subject of in-depth debate in Brazilian courts and academia, particularly due to some innovations that require further reflection on the possibility and manner of their application in labor proceedings.
This is the first procedural code drafted under a democratic regime, the result of a broad and lengthy debate carried out by all actors in the justice system, each of whom, obviously, beyond their concern for the effective implementation of the principle of reasonable duration of proceedings, is interested in resolving the major problems that hinder the performance of their duties.
For labor judges, there is an additional concern in this environment of so many uncertainties. Our Consolidation of Labor Laws contains scattered rules on labor proceedings, so the omission addressed in Article 769 will not always occur.
Add to this anguish the wording of Article 15 of Law No. 13.105/15, which states, "In the absence of rules regulating electoral, labor, or administrative processes, the provisions of
this Code shall be applied supplementarily and subsidiarily." Now, how can this provision be reconciled with the principles that guide labor proceedings? How can subsidiarity and supplementarity be characterized without compromising the fundamentals that characterize the process as capable of protecting workers who, as a rule, find themselves at a disadvantage compared to their opponents?
These are questions that will be unraveled over time, but they are already generating concerns among legal practitioners, as the content of our Journal reveals.
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The Editorial Board