Still the Origin and Introduction of Appeal on the Lusitanian Right

Abstract

At the end of the seventy years, during the exile of Professor Marcello Caetano in Brazil, we have the occasion to establish a delightful and profitable conviviality with the illustrious master, placing our dialogues, mainly, on the history of the Lusitanian juridical institutions history and on reflexes those have proportionated on the national right. Because the sources could not clarify as for the accurate date in which the first law upon appeal was enacted in Portugal, we have asked, once, in a sunny dinner at the Guanabara coast, what the think about this: should this has occurred at the Leiria Courts on 1254, or at those of Coimbra, seven years later, or further, in the middle of one and another? The master has no immediately answered, because the theme needs vitality, choosing to have left it to another day or to future correspondence. The death have, however, collected him, and we will know the answer only when his posthumous work were published, the History of the Portuguese Right (História do Direito Português), in which the studies that formerly we have performed about this subject-matter are commented by him on the appropriate chapter. More as homage to the historian, jurist and professor, we draft these complementary lines about the theme, preliminarily approaching the socio-juridical conditions in which have lived and acted the subjects of the newly-formed Lusitanian Kingdom; the condition in which, later on, in reason of the ideas developed at Universities, were applied to several institutes arising out from the Roman Right; and, finally, the moment in which would be determinated, as legal rule, under the patterns of the ancient appellatio, the appeal resource in Portugal.