We seek to shed new light on 19th-century legal thought in Brazil, by focusing on elements of legal realism at precisely the time that legal positivism is being consolidated on the European continent. The paper discusses the writings of Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, the Brazil's first codifier and perhaps one of its most important legal thinkers, in order to achieve a glimpse of traditional legal thinking of the period. The technique of codification employed by this author is laid out as being representative of its time, in consonance with an interpretation from the point of view of Roman law of the reality of legal phenomena in the time. The article concludes that Brazil followed its own peculiar path of legal development.

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