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Biography
Mariana Almeida Kato is a Teaching Associate at the University of Nottingham. Previously, she worked as a Teaching & Research Assistant at the Université Grenoble Alpes and the Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France). Her thesis ("Transparency on Constitutional Courts, a Comparative Essay") was awarded the 2022 Dalloz Thesis Prize and was published in 2023. She has various publications on Public Law, Human Rights and Comparative Law, primarily related to transparency, access to information, public participation in Courts.
Mariana's research interests span widely across the disciplines of Comparative Public Law. She is particularly interested in Comparative Constitutional Law and Law&Courts. Her approach prioritises context and culture, recognising that conventional comparative studies often overlook local particularities and are inadequate for researching non-traditional legal systems. In contrast to many traditional comparative studies developed in the Global North, she adopts a decolonial approach, seeking to critically examine traditional legal systems while drawing on innovative legal approaches emerging in the global South, more specifically in Latin America.
In her doctoral research, she studied judicial transparency in the context of the French Constitutional Council, the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the US Supreme Court. To address this subject, beyond the study of legal norms related to transparency, she focused her attention on non-legal elements (such as interviews and social media communications) related to life in the jurisdiction and that have an impact on their practices. She argued that even if the meaning and scope of transparency are deeply embedded in each legal culture, transparency both as a practice and as a discourse is at the core of a broader phenomenon related to how judicial legitimacy is currently understood and the importance of public opinion. Moreover, she demonstrates how institutional and personal habits and practices related to transparency, such as the ones related to the Court's communication, may have an impact on the life of a jurisdiction. Based on these findings, she made pragmatic recommendations to enhance transparency in the courts studied.
In more recent work, she has explored other themes regarding the dynamic role of Constitutional Courts and Human Rights Courts in the contemporary political context, or the theoretical dimensions of comparative constitutional law research.
Mariana is a qualified lawyer at the Brazilian Bar Association and trained at several practices in Brazil, mostly working with on private-public partnerships, concessions of public service, economic regulation and public procurement in the context of infrastructure project. Drawing from this experience, she has published several papers in leading Brazilian journals on these topics, such as the Revista Brasileira de Direito Administrativo - RDA and the Revista De Direito Publico Da Economia - RDPE.
Mariana also holds a PhD from the the Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France), where she completed her fully-funded doctoral thesis in Comparative Constitutional Law, a Master of Laws in Constitutional Law and Fundamental Rights from Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (France), a Master of Laws in Public Law from Université Paris V Descartes (France), and a Bachelor in Law, with a major in Public Law, from Universidade Federal do Paraná (Brazil).
In addition to her work at the University of Nottingham, she is also an associate editor of the world-leading blog in Comparative Constitutional Law, the IACL blog, and she was recently appointed as Director of Internationalisation of the Committee of Freedom of Religion of the Brazilian Bar Association in Paraná.
Expertise Summary
Teaching Summary
Mariana currently teaches Public Law, EU Law, European Convention on Human Rights, and Civil Law - A Comparative Introduction at the University of Nottingham. In the past, throughout her academic… read more
Selected Publications
M ALMEIDA KATO, 2023. La transparence de la justice constitutionnelle : une étude de droit comparé (France, Brésil, États-Unis) 1. Dalloz.
M ALMEIDA KATO, 2025. Methodologies of Comparative Constitutional Law. In: R GROTE, F LACHENMANN and R WOLFRUM, eds., Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law [MPECCoL]
M ALMEIDA KATO, S BADRAN, A DANET and C DERAEDT, eds., 2024. Mode et Droit Mare&Martin.
M ALMEIDA KATO, 2024. Book review: 'Effective Domestic Remedies and the European Court of Human Rights: Applications of the European Convention on Human Rights Article 13, written by Michael Reiertse’ ECHR Law Review. 5(4), 513-517
Mariana currently teaches Public Law, EU Law, European Convention on Human Rights, and Civil Law - A Comparative Introduction at the University of Nottingham. In the past, throughout her academic career in various institutions, she has also taught International Relations, French Constitutional Law, French Administrative Law, and Brazilian Constitutional Law.