Transnational dialogues in Brazilian legal journals (1904-1914)1

Even though they are men to whom historians interested in globalization of

culture barely ever turn their attention, jurists have been, in several moments,
profoundly involved in transnational dialogues, either because of legal aspects of
diplomatic relations or because of the great attribution of value to other countries’
experiences that is peculiar to their field of knowledge. That last aspect tends to grow
stronger in conjunctures of institutional change, when, confronted with the needs to
rethink the legal system and cooperate with the writing of new acts, these bachelors
think of themselves as real demiurges of times yet to come and of a future stabilization
of social conflicts. In this process, especially when the act in question is a code, a type
of systematic legal document that emerges at the start of the XIXth century, under the
influence of enlightened ideals and with the double aspiration to completeness and
perenniality, attempts to discuss and to make use of the legal production originated in
various locations can often be found. That is reinforced by the long temporality that is
characteristic of law,2 which results in a circulation of ideas and of concepts that far
surpass the place and the historical moment of their original enunciation.
In the first decades of the republican regime in Brazil, these questions
manifested themselves with particular strength, due to the search to make acts and
institutions adequate to the new political situation. In 1890, a new criminal code was
passed. The debates about the making of a civil code – which, in spite of efforts like
Teixeira de Freitas’s consolidation (1857), didn’t advance during the imperial years –
grew more concrete with the publishing of Clovis Bevilaqua’s project in 1899.3 These
years were also a moment of expansion of legal teaching, starting from the Benjamin
                                                            
1
This paper was written especially for ESPEA. Its subject is not exactly what I am studying in my
masters (in progress at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, under the supervision of Professor Eliana
Dutra), even though it is directly related to both my current and my future research interests. My masters
focuses on legal journals published in Brazil between 1936 and 1943, more specifically on the debates
about legal changes that were then taking place, under the command of the Vargas government. I intend to
later start a PhD project about the exchange of publications and the intellectual transfers between jurists
in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, within a time frame similar to the one I’m studying in the masters. This
text is an effort, even if quite exploratory, to reflect upon this particular type of printed material in a
diachronic perspective and a first attempt to study the transnational dialogues in the pages of those
magazines.
2
About law’s peculiar relation with time, characterized by aspirations to lastingness and the possibility of
being applied repeatedly, see: KOSELLECK, Reinhart. Histoire, droit et justice. In: L'expérience de
l'histoire. Paris: Seuil, Gallimard, 1997, p. 161-180.
3
This project would become the Brazilian Civil Code of 1916 and would only be replaced in 2002.
Constant (1891) and Rivadávia Correa (1911) reforms, which ruptured the monopoly of
the legal courses of São Paulo and Recife, founded shortly after the Independence
movement with the aim of forming ruling forces for the new nation, and resulted in the
creation of “free schools” in many other centers.4
In the late “long XIXth century” Brazil, to a large extent because of the
condition of polygraphs of many of the law bachelors, in a moment in which the access
to literate careers was still quite restrict and specialized humanities degrees were non-
existent or, at least, incipient, the debates developed within those intellectual circles
were never limited to strictly legal circuits. They often touched broader questions, of
political, social or cultural nature. The turn of the 1800’s towards the 1900’s was also,
and not by chance, a moment of strong expansion of the specialized legal press in
Brazil. To a degree, that happened due to official incentive: the creation of academic
journals was one of the conditions imposed by the government upon the establishment
of new “free schools of law”. The emergence of broader and more ambitious enterprises
in the 1900’s and 1910’s leads us to suspect, however, that deeper intellectual questions,
as well as efforts to intervene in the public space, might have motivated the launching
of new law magazines. This impression is made stronger by the perception that the
concomitance of the establishment of a republican government and the development of
publications specialized in law can also be found in other countries, for example in
France, as described by Fatiha Cherfouh when studying the 1870’s e 1880’s.5
Taking all these questions into account, we will briefly discuss the place given to
foreign publications and authors in the initial moments of three legal journals that
emerged in Brazil at the start of the country’s republican era. Revista Forense was first
published in January 1904, under the direction of Estevão Pinto and Mendes Pimentel,
both then professors of the Law School of Minas Gerais. In its first edition, no clear
program was presented, but the publication sought to establish a dialogue with its
readers in the “Notas e informações” [“Notes and informations”] section, at the end of
the same fascicle. Among the small texts that composed this section of the magazine,
one alludes to the book Teoria da nulidade dos atos e convenções [“Theory of nullity of

                                                            
4
According to VENANCIO FILHO, Alberto. Das arcadas ao bacharelismo. 150 anos de ensino jurídico
no Brasil. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1982, p. 179 and following pages.
5
CHERFOUH, Fatiha. L’impossible projet d’une revue de la Belle Époque. L’émergence d’un juriste
scientifique. Mil neuf cent. Revue d’histoire intellectuelle. n. 29, 2011, p. 61-62.
acts and conventions”], by the French jurist Victor Hippolyte Solon, originally
published in the first half of the XIXth century and translated especially for the seriate
edition in the pages of Forense. In this text, it is interesting to note that, to the
glorification of the European writer, is added the intention to put forward the “national”
contribution to the text, by the means of the notes put into the translation:
The notes, through which the knowledge and the long forensic experience of
the illustrious professor of Theory and Practice of Procedure [Levindo
Ferreira Lopes] are going to enrich the version of the out of stock and rare
work of Solon, will amplify the merits of the publication.6
The first copy of Revista de Direito Civil, Comercial e Criminal came to public
in Rio de Janeiro in July 1906, under the initiative of Antonio Bento de Faria, lawyer
who would later become the president of Brazil’s Supreme Court (1937-1940). Its note
of presentation, published under the unpretending title “Duas palavras” [“Two words”],
attempted to establish a sort of cultural and political “mission” for the new publication
and its congeners, asserting that “they are the agents of preparation of the materials with
which new laws will be constructed, or works of greater volume will be formed.”7 The
journal was clearly ambitious: the same note points out that it would never have less
than 200 pages per fascicule (Forense had about 80 pages) and would always follow the
division of subjects present in its first number. In this internal layout, one factor sticks
out: the presence of sections of foreign “doutrina” (term used in Portuguese to refer to
theoretical law articles) and “jurisprudência” (collections of court decisions). Even
though they were less vast, those sections were always placed before their national
equivalents, which expresses choices from the editors that are far from innocent. In the
first year of the magazine’s existence, the opening towards other countries was limited
to Portugal, Italy, France and, less frequently, Switzerland, Belgium and Germany (in
the last case, through French translations).
Released a few years later, in 1912, the São Paulo-based Revista dos Tribunais
stands out because of its founder and first director, a polygraph par excellence: Plínio
Barreto, who associated his juridical activities to journalism, especially in the daily O
Estado de São Paulo, for which he wrote from forensic chronicles to literary critiques,
often quoting French publications, like the Revue des Deux Mondes. The writing of the
presentation note, titled “Programa de uma revista” [“A journal’s program”] was,

                                                            
6
Revista Forense. Belo Horizonte, v. I, fasc. 1º, 15 de janeiro de 1904, p. 89.
7
Revista de Direito Civil, Comercial e Criminal. Rio de Janeiro, v. I, fasc. 1º, julho de 1906, p. IV.
however, commissioned not to the head of its editorial staff, but to a then much
renowned jurist, Pedro Lessa. In this text, probably entrusted to Lessa as part of a
strategy of legitimation for the new title, he makes explicit reference to the place that
would be given to the dialogue with other countries:
Given the phenomenon of the growing coordination of the civilized nations,
ever increasingly tied by their industries, by commerce, by the arts, by
science, by politics, by moral and by law, and ever increasingly influencing
each other’s progress, this cooperation between all of them for the betterment
of legal institutes, through the investigation of the truths that serve as basis
for those institutes, is a natural and much precious consequence.8
In the first year of its existence, the analysis of the pages of the magazine makes clear
which were the nations considered “civilized”. In the “Jurisprudência estrangeira”
[“Foreign court decisions”] section, published at the end of each fascicule, the notes
were entirely based upon European publications, mainly the French Journal de Droit
International Privé and Revue de Trimestrielle de Droit Civil and the Italian Rivista de
Diritto Comerciale.
This brief overview allows us to outline the following conclusion: even though
linguistic limitations or material restrictions to the circulation of printed material can
also be invoked as possible explanations for the strong emphasis on European countries
– chiefly France – in the transnational dialogues established within the pages of
Brazilian legal journals released at the start of the Republic, that fact was related to an
effort to, through law, integrate Brazil into the group of “civilized nations”, to use once
more the terminology (quite common in the period here studied) employed by Pedro
Lessa. This interest in getting to know and establishing dialogues with foreign ideas and
authors was certainly connected to the intention of refounding the legal system on a
republican basis. At the same time, the absence of dialogue with the Hispano American
neighbors is striking, given the fact that those relations would grow surprisingly strong
in the following decades.9 Both questions can be seen as riveting calls to integrate jurists
to the universe of studies of globalization of culture – if not for any other reasons, at
least because in Brazil, during the XIXth century and a good part of the XXth (as
exemplified with Plínio Barreto), they were often the same men who engaged
themselves in major newspapers, in literature, in social thought.
                                                            
8
LESSA, Pedro. Programa de uma revista. Revista dos Tribunais. São Paulo, v. I, fasc. 1º, 2 de fevereiro
de 1912, p. 7, emphasis added.
9
In the bibliographical reviews of several legal journals published in Brazil between 1936 and 1943, we
were able to locate 138 foreign publications, among which only 27 were published in Europe or in the
United States.