Augusto Teixeira de Freitas (1816–1883) was a prominent Brazilian jurist whose prolific writings inspired all South American private law

Private law

Private law is that part of a civil law legal system which is part of the jus commune that involves relationships between individuals, such as the law of contracts or torts, as it is called in the common law, and the law of obligations as it is called in civilian legal systems...

 codifications.

After studies at Olinda

Olinda

Olinda is a historic city in the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, located on the country's northeastern Atlantic Ocean coast, just north of Recife and south of Paulista...

 and São Paulo

São Paulo

São Paulo is the largest city in Brazil, the largest city in the southern hemisphere and South America, and the world's seventh largest city by population. The metropolis is anchor to the São Paulo metropolitan area, ranked as the second-most populous metropolitan area in the Americas and among...

, Teixeira de Freitas practiced law as an advocate and jurisconsult. As president of the Order of Advocates and legal counsel to the State Council of the Empire of Brazil, he composed the first systematic compilation of Brazilian civil law (Consolidação das Leis Civis, 1857), which served in lieu of a civil code

Civil code

A civil code is a systematic collection of laws designed to comprehensively deal with the core areas of private law. A jurisdiction that has a civil code generally also has a code of civil procedure...

effectively until 1916.

His magnum opus, the Esboço de Código Civil (1860-64), a draft civil code, remained incomplete after 4,908 articles had been written, at which point the government released the exhausted jurist from his commission. The Esboço was nonetheless a pioneering work and constituted the basis of later codifications in Brazil, Argentina and the rest of South America.