João Baptista de Ataíde Mascarenhas Cordovil’s Notebooks about the Portuguese Law

Abstract

Eleven years after the introduction of the eighteenth-century reform of the legal education system in Portugal, among all the Canon Law students who are attending the fifth year, stays João Baptista de Ataíde Mascarenhas Cordovil, a friar of the Saint Francis Third Order and future inquisitor. With an irreprehensible scholar performance, his importance lies in a set of two manuscripts attributed to him whose custody belongs nowadays, one to the National Archive of Torre do Tombo and the other in the Public Library of Évora. According to an attentive writing, their content illustrates the object and methodology followed in the new discipline of Portuguese Law, that should not be discarded, since the compendiums required by the University Statutes to the new disciplines were still unaccomplished. Once it is totally impossible to develop all the subjects presented in these texts, after a preliminary and comparative explanation, this study ends with an analysis of the rules of the interpretation of the law, a topic that was exhaustively treated by the legislator of the Enlightenment in full accordance with the current Legal Philosophy approach.