The Brazilian Supreme Court has developed an informal mechanism of timing control: each justice has the power (pedido de vista) to request more time to study the files of a given case. In this article, we use a database of over 1.5 million cases to calculate vista request duration and compare vista behavior to other activities in which caseload and the justice’s efficiency play a role. Our results show that vistas can function as an individual power, unconstrained by the Court’s internal rules of procedure, to indefinitely remove cases from the agenda, in ways that cannot be explained by the Court’s workload. We also find initial evidence of the vistas being used for strategic purposes, when justices wait for a case to be decided in a more favorable composition or political context. These results suggest that comparative analyses of courts should look beyond formal rules of docket control to study informal means of delay.

Existing algorithms for building layouts from geometric primitives are typically designed to cope with requirements such as orthogonal alignment, overlap removal, optimal area usage, hierarchical organization, among others. However, most techniques are able to tackle just a few of those requirements simultaneously, impairing their use and flexibility. In this work we propose a novel methodology for building layouts from geometric primitives that concurrently addresses a wider range of requirements. Relying on multidimensional projection and mixed integer optimization, our approach arranges geometric objects in the visual space so as to generate well structured layouts that preserve the semantic relation among objects while still making an efficient use of display area. Moreover, scalability is handled through a hierarchical representation scheme combined with navigation tools. A comprehensive set of quantitative comparisons against existing geometry-based layouts and applications on text, image, and video data set visualization prove the effectiveness of our approach.

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Judicialization of the right to health and institutional changes in Brazil Judicialização do direito à saúde e mudanças institucionais no Brasil LEANDRO MOLHANO RIBEIRO*

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