Augusto Teixeira de Freitas (1816–1883) was a prominent Brazilian jurist whose prolific writings inspired all

South American South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

private law Private law is that part of a legal system that governs interactions between individual persons. It is distinguished from public law, which deals with relationships between both natural and artificial persons (i.e., organizations) and the st ...

codifications. After studies at

Olinda Olinda () is a historic city in Pernambuco, Brazil, in the Northeast Region, Brazil, Northeast Region. It is located on the country's northeastern Atlantic Ocean coast, in the Recife metropolitan area, Metropolitan Region of Recife, the state ca ...

and

São Paulo São Paulo (; ; Portuguese for 'Paul the Apostle, Saint Paul') is the capital of the São Paulo (state), state of São Paulo, as well as the List of cities in Brazil by population, most populous city in Brazil, the List of largest cities in the ...

, Teixeira de Freitas practiced law as an advocate and jurisconsult. As president of the Order of Advocates and legal counsel to the State Council of the

Empire of Brazil The Empire of Brazil was a 19th-century state that broadly comprised the territories which form modern Brazil and Uruguay until the latter achieved independence in 1828. The empire's government was a Representative democracy, representative Par ...

, he composed the first systematic compilation of Brazilian civil law (''Consolidação das Leis Civis'', 1857), which served ''in lieu'' of a

civil code A civil code is a codification of private law relating to property law, property, family law, family, and law of obligations, obligations. A jurisdiction that has a civil code generally also has a code of civil procedure. In some jurisdiction ...

effectively until 1916. His ''magnum opus'', the ''Esboço de Código Civil'' (1860–64), a draft civil code, remained incomplete after 4,908 articles had been written, at which point the government released the exhausted jurist from his commission. The ''Esboço'' was nonetheless a pioneering work and constituted the basis of later codifications in Brazil, Argentina (by Dalmacio Velez Sarsfield) and the rest of South America.

References

* * 1816 births 1883 deaths Brazilian jurists {{Brazil-law-bio-stub