This paper addresses political and legal transformations associated with the overflow of legal norms and procedural practices between different jurisdictions. Although the expansionist impulse of legal forms, usually in asymmetrical political conditions, is by no means a new phenomenon, there seem to be specific qualities in the contemporary spread of procedural concepts, norms and procedures, particularly concerning the global spread, from the 1990s onwards, of criminal prosecution mechanisms characteristic of the US model of criminal justice - notably the plea bargaining institute. However, little effort has been devoted to examining how these processes are concretely occurring. Taking the Brazilian case as a reference, the ethnography initially follows the path that led to the formalization of plea deals in criminal legislation, paying attention to the references, justifications and expectations then present in the parliamentary debate about their effects. It then addresses Supreme Court judgments that at first debated the legal nature of plea bargaining and, subsequently, impasses arising from the proliferation of this institute, which became, according to one of the Court's judges, an instrument of 'psychological torture to obtain 'evidence' against innocent people.' The description of these two moments in the trajectory of plea bargaining in the Brazilian justice system leads us to consider how the propagation and recombination of legal forms trigger conceptual and practical rearticulations in the specific systems in which these institutes begin to act, with legal-political effects to a certain extent unpredictable and uncontrollable. At the same time, it allows for deeper anthropological reflection on the problematic boundaries between national jurisdictions and contemporary forms of legal colonialism.