Extrajudicial petitions and the guarantee of rights in the overseas territory (1750-1808)

• Grant number: 19/00456-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: November 01, 2019
• End date: January 03, 2022
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - History - History of Brazil
• Principal Investigator: Andrea Slemian
• Grantee: Renata Silva Fernandes
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In this research proposal, we intend to analyze the petitioner mechanism and its mobilization by individuals and corporations of Portuguese America between 1750 and 1808. The investigation will focus on petitions filed extrajudicially against acts and/or public authorities and, when sources are available, on the responses to the claims by the royal power and its representatives. Methodologically, we propose to cross-cut the juridical-institutional, social and discursive dimensions of the petitions. To do so entails firstly inventorying, quantifying and categorizing the forms of appeal in which the petitions were filed and their modes of functioning both theoretically, by reading doctrinal texts, and in practical terms, drawing up a relational database that exploits the legal-normative components applied in contingent cases, as well as the profile of supplicants and authorities. This scope of observation will be constructed from a corpus based on documents of the Capitania de Minas Gerais, chosen in an exemplary dimension, given its archival and contextual relevance. Secondly, we must examine the "petition and response system" used by the subjects to provoke reactions from the government entities. Scrutinizing them should allow us to recover argumentative protocols that were essential to the examination of the modes of evaluation and judgment of authority. Laws, orders, letters, permits and provisions prompted by petitions from various parts of Portuguese America will also be consulted in the light of rhetorical and legal treatises. The main contribution we intend to offer is to elucidate the doctrinal and practical conformation of extrajudicial instruments based on the guarantee of rights before the eventual arbitration of the public authorities. (AU)

Scientific publications

(References retrieved automatically from Web of Science and SciELO through information on FAPESP grants and their corresponding numbers as mentioned in the publications by the authors)

RENATA SILVA FERNANDES. A justiça como parâmetro do governo: o Conselho de Governo e o Conselho Geral na província de Minas Gerais (1825-1834). História, v. 39, 2020-10-05. (19/00456-0)

RENATA SILVA FERNANDES. O CONSELHO ULTRAMARINO E AS QUEIXAS E AGRAVOS DO ULTRAMAR PORTUGUÊS (MINAS GERAIS, 1750-1808). Revista de História, n. 181, 2022-02-25. (19/00456-0)