From 2 to 4 July 2025, Sarah Limão Papa participated in the 8th Biennial Conference of the European Society for Comparative Legal History (ESCLH), held at the University of Szeged, Hungary.
The ESCLH conference is one of the most important international gatherings for legal historians, bringing together scholars from around the world to explore connections across legal traditions, time periods, and regions.
Sarah presented part of her ongoing doctoral research in the panel Chapters from the World of Private and Commercial Law, with a paper titled Immemorial Possession: Conflicts over Commons in 18th-Century Portuguese America. The paper explored how local communities in colonial Brazil invoked customary rights and natural law to defend their access to natural resources, raising questions about the fragmentation of property and the persistence of collective rights within the colonial legal order.
More on the event and the full programme can be accessed here.
