Surprise Heirs II: Illegitimacy, Inheritance Rights, and Public Power in the Formation of Imperial Brazil, 1822-1889

by Linda Lewin

Focusing on the inheritance rights of people born outside wedlock, this book explores the legal evolution of their rights as Brazil moved from colony to nation. It offers a unique counterpoint to the conventional political history of the Brazilian Empire, which ignores important legal change involving family and inheritance law. The book also provides a new and complementary approach to recent scholarship on the family in nineteenth-century Brazil by using that research as a starting point for examining illegitimacy, marriage, and concubinage from the neglected perspective of legal change. The author’s exhaustive study of parliamentary debates reveals how the private sphere of the family acquired fundamental significance in the public discourse of Brazil’s imperial legislators. The concluding theme of the book treats the reactionary shift away from liberal reform, the result of the “scandal in the courtroom” that the reform generated.

432 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2003

Reviews

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vol. 1 shows the major differences between Anglo-American and Luso-Brazilian legal traditions into explicit focus underscoring how the meaning of bastardy historically imposed a distinction between two sub-systems of European inheritance. In Vol 2, Lewin examines and interprets how Brazilian legislators, during the first three decades of independence, proposed to rewrite those inheritance rights vis-a-vis illegitimate individuals and revised or discarded portions of the enduring national code of law received from Portugal. She uses the process of making law as the focus for concluding how public power confronted illegitimacy and inheritance rights during Brazil's crucial passage from colony to nation. She also connects law to customary values and family patterns.

Lewin's book is THICK and dense. Interesting historical information but not relevant for me so I did not enjoy it much.

"it is important to appreciate the legal watershed defined by Law No. 463 of 1847. Not only was it the nineteenth century's most important piece of legislation pertaining to the inheritance rights of illegitimate individuals…but it also stood as a reaction to earlier efforts to liberalize the legal position of illegitimate individuals."