Created on the initiative of Professor Eduardo Vera-Cruz Pinto, the Historical Archive of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon holds around 90.000 documents from the period between 1913 – when the School was founded – and the early 1990s. Particularly significant are the sections on Correspondence Received and Sent and the School Notebooks of former students, through which the history of the Faculty, its scientific, pedagogical and administrative activities and its relations with national and international organisations are portrayed. In a collection of documents that almost completely covers the political, legal, social and cultural life of the 20th century, we can find a mixture of papers from foreign universities, as many from Portuguese organisations, letters from higher courts and the autographs of important figures in contemporary political and cultural life – for example, five Nobel prizes, eight heads of state, nine heads of government, twelve heads of education and one hundred and fifty full professors.

With regard to Brazil, of particular interest are the images of President Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira’s visit to the University of Lisbon (1963) and the handwritten letters from eminent personalities such as Afonso Celso, José de Alcântara Machado, Waldemar Ferreira, Haroldo Valladão, Pedro Calmon, Miguel Reale, Orlando Gomes and Gilberto Freyre.

The Historical Archive of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon can be visited by appointment 72 hours in advance(idbrasileiro@fd.ul.pt or gsm@sapo.pt).