TITLE:
Private International Law in Brazil: Overview and Recent Developments
AUTHORS:
Carmen Tiburcio, Ely Caetano Xavier Junior
KEYWORDS:
Private International Law, Brazil, Nationality, Legal Status of Aliens, Applicable Law, International Jurisdiction, Legislative Reforms
JOURNAL NAME:
Beijing Law Review,
Vol.17 No.4,
October
9,
2026
ABSTRACT: Private International Law governs legal relationships connected with more than one legal system, and the Brazilian tradition assigns to it four independent subject matters: nationality, the legal status of aliens, the determination of the applicable law, and jurisdiction in international litigation. This article offers an overview of the discipline as it currently stands in Brazil, organized around those four subject matters and addressed to readers trained in other legal systems. It first examines the attribution and loss of Brazilian nationality, from the international framework governing the matter to the constitutional rules on nationality by birth and by naturalization. It then turns to the legal status of aliens, covering entry into and departure from the territory, the rights of migrants once admitted, and the measures of compulsory removal. The third part addresses the determination of the applicable law, examining the classes of norms the discipline employs, the Brazilian connecting rules for persons, family, property, obligations, succession, and legal entities, and the principles that control their operation. The fourth part deals with jurisdiction, setting out the heads of Brazilian jurisdiction under the Code of Civil Procedure and the grounds on which jurisdiction may be expanded or restricted. The article argues that command of this body of rules and principles is strategic rather than merely technical, since cross-border relationships are settled at an intersection of legal systems, courts, and applicable laws, and the choices made at that intersection frequently determine substantive outcomes long before any dispute arises. It further shows that the four subject matters have been modernized at markedly different rates over the last decades: nationality, migration, and jurisdiction have all been considerably reformed, whereas conflict of laws remains governed by a statute of 1942, which a Draft General Law concluded in 2025 now proposes to replace.