The migration of the Portuguese crown to Brazil is one of the strangest acts in European history: an entire royal family, court, library, and bureaucracy packed onto ships in 1807 and moved to a colony. The legal system went with them. When Brazil declared independence in 1822, Dom Pedro I kept much of the colonial apparatus - including, eventually, the Supremo Tribunal de Justica established in 1829 to serve the new empire. When the monarchy fell in 1889 and the republic was proclaimed, the constitution that followed created the current Supreme Federal Court. Interestingly, Brazil's first president Deodoro da Fonseca could have named an entirely new slate of justices; he chose instead to reappoint the sitting imperial ministers, preserving institutional continuity across a political rupture.

The number of justices has bounced. The 1891 Constitution set it at 15. Getulio Vargas cut it to 11. A 1965 military-era reform raised it back to 16, then a 1969 reform cut it to 11 again, where it has stayed. The judges are called Ministros, a title with no connection to the executive branch. They are nominated by the president, confirmed by the Federal Senate, and serve until a mandatory retirement age of 75. The presidency of the court rotates by seniority every two years to avoid politicization; by tradition, the senior minister who has not yet served gets the job, and elections are never unanimous because the justices do not vote for themselves. The chief justice is fourth in the line of succession to the Brazilian presidency, behind the vice president and the heads of the two legislative chambers.

In May 2009, The Economist called the STF "the most overburdened court in the world." Brazil's 1988 constitution is one of the longest and most detailed in the world, enumerating rights and privileges at a level of specificity that continually sends disputes upward to the constitutional court. Until recent reforms, Supreme Court decisions did not bind lower courts, so the same questions kept coming back. The result: in 2008 the court received more than 100,000 cases - a workload no bench of eleven judges can realistically manage. Overrule decisions are frequent enough that legal scholars joke about them, and the politics around the justices can get bitter. The STF has been both hero and villain in Brazilian political life depending on which side is losing.

The court has been physically attacked twice in recent years. On January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed the court building along with the National Congress and the Palacio do Planalto, trying to provoke a military coup against the newly inaugurated Lula government. The court ruled the attack an act of terrorism, and by March more than 2,000 people had been arrested. Less than two years later, on November 13, 2024, a bomb exploded outside the court building. The perpetrator was the only fatality - the attacker detonated the device after apparently being unable to enter. Both events placed the court at the center of an ongoing argument about whether Brazilian democracy, restored only in 1985 after twenty-one years of military dictatorship, can hold.