Abstract
The present paper approaches how the relation between the body of work of the Brazilian jurist Augusto Teixeira de Freitas and the German Friedrich Carl von Savigny is portraited in the Brazilian legal-historiographic literature. The initial hypothesis is that both jurists are part of the historical dimension of the Brazilian civil law’s paradigm, setting, therefore, a portion of its legal tradition’s anatomy. The development of the research has shown that the relation Freitas-Savigny is propagated as a literary commonplace with not only rhetorical purposes, but also suggestive of a relative independence between scientific historical knowledge and the articulation of memory in the legal field. This commonplace would then serve as a medium to demonstrate the convergence between the Brazilian and German civil law - meaning, on the Brazilian side, the departure from the Portuguese law and the refusal of the French model of civil law codification -, as well as an evidence of the originality and quality of Teixeira de Freitas’ work and of the Brazilian civil law itself.
Keywords
Civil law codification; Brazilian Empire; civil law; historiography; memory