Contact
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 at the Université de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, where she completed her fully-funded PhD in Comparative Constitutional Law. 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 and Comparative Law, primarily related to transparency, access to information and public participation in Courts.
Mariana is a qualified lawyer at the Brazilian Bar Association and trained at several practices in Brazil. Mariana also holds 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).
Expertise Summary
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.
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
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.
Past Research
Driven by the differing cultural attitudes towards transparency in the French Constitutional Council, the Brazilian Supreme Court, and the US Supreme Court, in her previous research Mariana analysed their different practices to understand the conditions under which transparency can deliver its intended benefits. To address this question, 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. Challenging the conventional transparency-secrecy dichotomy, she argues that the meaning and scope of transparency are deeply embedded in each legal culture and that, depending on how it is practiced, transparency can have both desirable and undesirable outcomes. Based on these findings, she made pragmatic recommendations to enhance transparency in the courts studied. The originality and quality of this research, which draws on a comparative perspective that encompasses a legal system of the Global South and a diverse range of non-legal sources, were acknowledged as it received the Dalloz Thesis Prize in 2022. It has also led to invitations to participate in conferences, and several papers have already been published.