Os direitos com objeto difuso e a prescrição

Abstract

This study investigates whether or not there is the occurrence of prescription of rights with diffuse object in Brazilian legal system. It also goes from protection of individual rights to transindividual rights, establishing the pillars of the protection of individual rights in Modernity, the main features of the jurisdictional liberal State and the transindividual rights, making a comparison among them. It presents a debate about the decadence in the classification theory of subjective rights formulated by Chiovenda and its adoption by Amorim Filho. It also addresses the relationship between law and procedure in Chiovenda, based on the thesis L Azione nel sistema della tutela dei diritti (1903), in which the Italian author presented a classification of subjective rights (to provisions and to potestatives), which served as the basis for the elaboration of Amorim Filho s criteria to distinguish between prescription and decadence, in his recognized article of 1961. Furthermore, this study examines the consequences of Amorim Filho`s dissertation in the subsequent doctrine and in the Brazilian Civil Code of 2002, pointing out some criticism guided by the need for proper understanding of the binomial law and process and the jurisdictional protection of transindividuals. It also goes back to the genesis of the "interessi legitimi" concept in the Italian doctrine as an attempt to substantiate "interessi colletivi e diffusi", and the transposition of this concept to the Brazilian legal system. This study defends that the phenomenon of rights with diffuse object must be thought from an objective perspective of fundamental rights and duties, as well as the application of objective Law. It claims that the adequate protection of the so-called diffuse rights demands rethinking and resizing several classical institutes of material law (and procedural law), because several of them were thought out to operate - and can only operate properly - at the individual level, having reduced or no function at the collective level, something which was proposed to be done with the institute of prescription, due to the fact that in the rights with diffuse object there is no subjective right, claim and law-suit in material law. Absence of those three central positions belonging to the material law level, especially about claim, leaves the prescription institute with no function in the collective level. In this scenario, it is concluded that there was no prescription on the rights with diffuse object