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On a primary level, Escravidão e direito (published in Portuguese) provides rich descriptions of Brazil’s 19th-century social and intellectual legal histories. Historians have extensively proved that, especially during the second half of the 19th century, Africans and Afro-Brazilians used the courts to obtain freedom, ultimately contributing to slavery’s demise. In relating dozens of judicial dramas, Dias Paes adds to this historiography, while opening windows onto a complex social world in w...