Casa da Suplicação: Lisbon's Appeal and Supreme Court at the end of the 18th century (1790-1810)

Abstract

The Casa da Suplicação was the most important judicial court of the Portuguese crown. Its jurisdiction, in last resort, included the whole of Portugal and all its overseas territories. This text analyses the court in the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, a period that will end up with the transfer of the royal court to Brazil. After drawing its institutional framework, where the internal organization of the court is described, the text traces the profile of the magistrates that served the Casa da Suplicação between 1790 and 1810. It concludes with an exploratory study on its functioning, through a quantitative analysis of its bureaucratic production and a geographic distribution of the origins of the files that were submitted to this central court.