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Between 1903 and 1909, the leaders of Brazil’s young republic, together with a newly empowered technical elite of physicians and engineers, carried out a major urban reform project in Rio de Janeiro, envisioning the then capital city as a symbol of the nation’s civilizational progress. To embellish, sanitize, and modernize the city, state authorities ordered thousands of expropriations and evictions that ultimately concentrated land in the hands of an even smaller elite and removed the poor from Rio’s downtown. In this dissertation, I argue that the urban reform was a watershed in the social, intellectual, and political histories of law in Brazil. The cross-class legal mobilization of urban citizens against the reform forced actors on both sides to re-articulate concepts such as individual rights, administrative independence and discretion, judicial review, public good, and separation of powers. By analyzing court records, legal doctrine, legislation, legislative debates, administrative documents, and newspapers, I show how legal mobilization, ideas, and institutions changed the histories of urban development, state interventionism and citizenship in Brazil. Legislators, state attorneys, and legal scholars who supported the ruling elite’s nation-building project promoted administrative independence and discretion as instruments of material progress. Although they were divided by class and race, landlords and tenants formed surprising alliances to resist expropriations and evictions by mobilizing rights claiming in courtrooms, the press, and street protest. Representing them, political activists and lawyers elaborated rights-based arguments that advanced a liberal conception of law and state power, centered on judicial review as a channel for limiting executive interference in people’s properties, homes, and bodies. Some of these activists and lawyers were political opponents of the liberal oligarchs who controlled the presidency and congress. Their arguments helped create a rights consciousness among the city’s residents that placed individual rights in opposition to state interventionism. While landlords relied on a conception of the absolute right to property to preserve their patrimonial power, Rio’s poor invoked the inviolability of their homes to oppose violent sanitary measures such as forced vaccinations and evictions. Overall, litigation failed to undermine the transfer of property to wealthy investors and the expulsion of the poor from the city’s center. Nonetheless, the courts played a decisive role in molding how the reform plan ultimately transformed Rio’s urban space. More importantly, opposition to the reform fueled the emergence of a rights consciousness and strategies of legal mobilization that allowed people who lacked political power, such as small property owners, and those who were largely excluded from political participation, such as poor tenants, to actively transform conceptions of citizenship and law in Brazil. Through consciousness and mobilization, they claimed their rights to live, work, and profit in the city, and forced elite law and policy makers – congressmen, public administrators, and legal scholars – to consider people’s individual rights against an emerging, powerful and exclusionary, administrative state.