After I spent a few years recording too many details of the career of lawyer Sobral Pinto between 1946 and the overthrow in 1964 of the government of President João Goulart, I was wisely informed by Sobralʹs grandson Roberto that what was most important in the career I was studying lay in the events that followed the coup against Goulart. And so my earlier effort was reduced to approximately one-third of its length, forming a Prologue that would allow that further research result in a full account of Sobralʹs reactions to the steps taken by the postcoup presidential administrations of...

When democracy came to Brazil in 1945, following eight years of the Estado Novo dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas, Heráclito Fontoura Sobral Pinto was a fifty-two-year-old lawyer known for having defended victims of the police, the military, and politicians in power. His harsh attacks against the dictatorship and his declarations calling for democratic principles gave him a place in the political group that created the anti-Vargas party, the udn (União Democrática Nacional), in 1945.

But Sobral, unlike the others, rejected any opportunities for receiving rewards or positions as a result of the birth of the new regime of popular elections. For...

Artur da Costa e Silva, an anti-Goulart general who had been holding a desk job, declared himself Chief of the Revolution because he headed the army hierarchy, having been the longest in active service, with four stars. Early in April 1964 he started a campaign to eradicate corruption and subversion from Brazil by means of arrests, and he gave orders to the interim president of Brazil, Chamber of Deputies head Ranieri Mazzilli, about the cabinet, whose new military ministers (including Costa e Silva) made up the ʺRevolutionary Command.ʺ

Sobral Pinto and Dario de Almeida Magalhães explained in the press that...

The governmentʹs austere financial policy, making steady but slow progress against inflation, was unpopular and was attacked fiercely by ambitious udn Governors Carlos Lacerda and Magalhães Pinto. Financial restraints, painful for wage earners and businessmen, gave ammunition to those who argued that the direct elections of eleven governors, if carried out as scheduled on October 3, 1965, would bring about a return of the ʺcorrupt and subversive.ʺ Press organs, such asO Estado de S. Paulo,O Globo, and theJornal do Brasil, questioned the wisdom of holding direct elections so soon. However, on February 13, 1965, President Castello Branco...

For Sobral Pinto, as head of the Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros (iab), the new institutional act brought insurmountable difficulties. Already his problems with the iab had been made evident back in May 1965 when his proposed motion to congratulate the Supreme Court for issuing a habeas corpus decision had been rejected at a meeting where a majority wished to avoid acting in a manner that might be interpreted as censuring the president of the republic.¹

On October 14, after the iab decided to set up a commission to study the reforms that Castello Branco submitted to Congress to fortify the...

By early 1966 President Castello Branco came around to agreeing with military leaders that direct elections for governors might be harmful to the work of the revolution, and therefore in February Institutional Act Number Three was issued to place the elections in the hands of the state legislatures. Sobral described Ato 3 as an affront to the nation and a confession by the government of its lack of popular support.¹

At a meeting of the Instituto dos Advogados Brasileiros (iab) held later in February, Sobral argued that Castello Branco did not have the authority to issue institutional and complementary acts....

Following the promulgation of Institutional Act Number Five, Celestino Basílio proposed that the iab refrain from judging it. Sobral called the proposal immoral, thus disturbing its backers.¹ In the end, the iab rejected Basílioʹs proposal and issued a careful statement of support of the government ʺin its effort to bring about juridical order.ʺ It expressed the hope that the decree laws to be issued would be limited to ʺcases of national security and the proper functioning of government finances.ʺ The oab was silent about Ato 5.²

On the other hand, the Brazilian bishops presented Costa e Silva with a message...

For the religious service to observe the fiftieth anniversary of the marriage of Sobral and Maria José, the family gathered on February 11, 1972, at the chapel of the Casa da Previdência, where Sobral usually worshipped. Among the participating churchmen were Cardinal Eugênio Sales, who called the couple ʺa model of Christianity,ʺ and Waldyr Calheiros, the bishop of Volta Redonda whom Sobral had defended.¹

Juscelino Kubitschek, unable to be in Rio, wrote Sobral a gracious letter on February 9 in which he said that on the 8th he had attended the Mass that marked the seventh anniversary of the death...

In 1978 Sobral became the lawyer for Riofaveladwellers who refused to be transferred from their shacks in the Morro de Vidigal to the Santa Cruz area, distant from the jobs they picked up in the city. And he helped the Centro Dom Vital observe, in November, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of its founder, Jackson de Figueiredo. Sobralʹs speech was critical of those who believed that one could be, at the same time, a good Christian and a member of the Masonic Order.¹

A Catholic intellectual friend of Sobralʹs who passed away in 1978 was the eighty-one-year-old...

When Sobral had spoken to Tancredo Neves about arrangements for a constitutional assembly, he had suggested that the Congress, to be elected in November 1986, act simultaneously as an ordinary Congress and a constitutional assembly, thus avoiding a period of executive decree laws, as had existed while the Constitutional Assembly of 1946 had devoted itself exclusively to writing a constitution.¹ Tancredoʹs ideas on the matter coincided with those of Sobral and were presented by President Sarney in a message asking Congress to enact the necessary constitutional amendment. The message, calling for the Constitutional Assembly to start work on February 1,...