Rights for Sale

This paper examines how the Brazilian Judiciary, historically regarded as a guardian of rights, has been gradually transforming the way such rights are understood and managed. Vacation and leave entitlements, once conceived as expressions of functional dignity, are increasingly relinquished voluntarily and converted into negotiable assets. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s immunitary paradigm and Friedrich Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, the study reflects on a shift from Hannah Arendt’s “right to have rights” toward what may be formulated, in this reading, as the “right to sell one’s own rights.” When it becomes possible to sell a right, a new legal semantics emerges in which rest ceases to function as a limit and is instead treated as a resource. One chooses to remain productive, accrue tasks, and postpone rest, thereby integrating into an institutional mechanism that manages vitality through performance. In this context, the functional body, including both civil servants and judges in active service, not only propels the institutional machinery but becomes its own measure of value. Power becomes embodied, and Law, in this trajectory, approaches a politics of lived time. This logic, progressively normalized through repeated administrative practices, is currently under review by the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court in the debate concerning the compensation of unused vacation by civil servants and judges in active service. The study therefore proposes a genealogy attentive to everyday juridical inscriptions, in order to understand how rights are redefined within the very bodies that enact them. In light of Esposito and Nietzsche, the right to rest may be described as a biopotent possibility: not as a monetary equivalence to be compensated but as creation within lived time, opening a vocabulary in which Law preserves a margin of alterity in relation to calculation, and in which rest appears as an affirmation of life against its reduction to measure.