Bruno Rodrigues de Lima studied law and history in Salvador, Brasilia, and Frankfurt am Main. In 2014, he received his Law degree from the State University of Bahia and became a lawyer accredited by the Brazilian Bar. After practicing law and representing clients before the Supreme Court, he pursued an LL.M. at the University of Brasilia. In 2022, he was awarded a Ph.D. in Legal History (summa cum laude) from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University for his thesis on the legal knowledge of the former enslaved person and self-trained lawyer Luiz Gama (1830-1882). In the same year, Lima earned the Walter Kolb Prize, the most prestigious dissertation prize conferred by both Goethe University and the Frankfurt City Hall. In 2023, he received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society, recognizing his outstanding scientific contributions "for the research on the legal history of Brazil and the history of the abolition of slavery."

In 2024, he received the Jabuti Prize for the "Book of the Year" in law published in Brazil and began a visiting professorship at FGV Sao Paulo Law School. In recent years, his work has gained considerable attention from various media outlets, including The Economist, The Guardian, BBC News, Deutsche Welle and Le Figaro. In Brazil, his research has been extensively covered by major newspapers, magazines, and TV channels, such as Folha de S. Paulo, TV Bandeirantes, Revista Veja, and O Globo. A scientific profile of Bruno Lima and his award-winning thesis is available in the Max Planck Forschung.

Publications

Farias, Cosme de; Lima, Bruno. (Org.)

Mud & Blood – Bahia 1926, 2nd Ed.

Salvador: Federal University of Bahia Press, 2018 (in Portuguese)

Source

Lima, Bruno

Memories of the état de siège in Bahia (1924-1926): politics, law and Constitution in testimonies of “Mud & Blood”.

In: Farias, Cosme de; Lima, Bruno (Org.) Mud & Blood – Bahia 1926, 2^nd Ed., Salvador: Federal University of Bahia Press, 2018, pp. 17-46

Book Review

Lima, Bruno.

Liberated Africans With Rights?

In: Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History - Zeitschrift des Max-Planck-Instituts für europäische Rechtsgeschichte, Vol. 27, pp. 414-416, 2019

Source

Selected Presentations

Black Reading of White Constitutions: Revisiting US and Brazilian Constitutional History from the Perspectives of Frederick Douglass and Luiz Gama, World Comparative Law Annual Conference, Humboldt University Berlin, July 2024

Becoming a Black Jurist in a Slave Society: On the Legal Biography of Luiz Gama (Brazil, 1830-1882), Colonial Legal Biography Workshop, Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, April 2023

Luiz Gama – Brazil’s Frederick Douglass, Center for the Study of Law and Society Speaker Series, University of California, Berkeley, USA, October 2022

The Untold Story of Abolitionism: Luiz Gama’s Freedom Claims in Brazil, 1850-1888, The Stanford Center for Law and History, Stanford Law School, USA, October 2022

Slavery, Freedom and Civil Law in the Brazilian Courts: How the Black Lawyer Luiz Gama Developed a Legal Doctrine that Freed Five Hundred Slaves, Latin America and Caribbean Workshop, Princeton University, USA, March 2020