Foreign Law Guide

FOREIGN LAW GUIDE

Researching the Law of Brazil

At a glance

Legal system family
Civil law, codified. Article 22 of the Constitution reserves to the Union alone the power to legislate on civil, commercial, criminal, procedural, electoral, agrarian, maritime, aeronautical, space and labour law. 2
Official gazette
Diario Oficial da Uniao. Exclusively electronic and published free on the Imprensa Nacional site under article 3 of Decreto no 9.215 of 29 November 2017, which also requires one printed copy to be archived. 1
Constitution in force
Constituicao da Republica Federativa do Brasil of 1988. The Chamber of Deputies serves the Portuguese text as updated to the hundred and thirty-ninth constitutional amendment, of 2026. 3
Language of the authoritative text
Portuguese. Article 13 of the Constitution provides that the Portuguese language is the official language of the Federative Republic of Brazil. 2

Brazilian federal law is announced in one place, and the decree governing the announcement is worth reading before the law is. Decreto no 9.215 of 29 November 2017 makes the Diario Oficial da Uniao exclusively electronic, published on the site of the Imprensa Nacional, and free to read there.

The interesting part is further down the same article. The Imprensa Nacional must print and keep in its archive at least one copy of every edition. And then, immediately after: the absence or the lateness of that printed copy does not remove the validity of the publication. Several systems in this guide kept paper when they went electronic and each answered differently about what the paper is now for. Brazil's answer is the flattest of them. The copy exists as evidence, and whether it exists decides nothing.

Authenticity is handled a paragraph later. Article 4 requires the publication on the Imprensa Nacional site to meet the requirements of authenticity, integrity, legal validity and interoperability of the Brazilian public key infrastructure. Article 6 gives the Imprensa Nacional technical autonomy over editing and making the gazette available, bounded by a principle of fidelity to the originals and by supervision from the Casa Civil. Article 7 is the human safeguard: where authorship is in doubt, publication waits on confirmation from the signing authority.

Article 10 sets the schedule, and it is the article to look at twice. As enacted in 2017 it had the gazette appear Monday to Friday, once a day, except on national holidays and on the discretionary days the federal administration takes off. A later wording, printed on the same page directly beneath it and attributed to Decreto no 10.031 of 2019, keeps the national holidays, requires a discretionary day to be a whole day rather than part of one, and confines that exception to the federal administration in the Federal District. It is not a rewording. It is a narrowing, and a reader who takes the first of the two paragraphs will expect the gazette to be absent on days when it now appears.

Access is free, and article 3 says so in a paragraph of its own. That sentence does more work than its length suggests. A gazette that is electronic only and charged for would put the statute book behind a till, and the decree closes that door in the same article in which it closes the press.

The page carrying all of this teaches something about the Planalto service itself, and it is the single most useful thing to know before using it. A Planalto consolidated text does not replace an amended article with its current wording. It prints every successive wording in sequence, each followed by a parenthetical naming the decree that supplied it. Article 2 of this decree appears three times on one screen: as enacted in 2017, as amended in 2019, and as amended again in 2023. A reader who takes the first paragraph they meet has the oldest one, and nothing on the page raises its voice about it.

The decree also lists what will not be published, and one entry there is a small masterpiece of administrative caution: acts of private parties whose language or format could induce the understanding that they are acts of a public authority. A gazette that carries commercial notices in the same run as statutes has to police that boundary, and this is the provision that does it.

The gazette itself is read through the Imprensa Nacional search service, and something about that service is worth knowing before leaning on it. The page assembles itself in the browser, and the list of stylesheets and scripts it declares differs from one response to the next, so two copies taken minutes apart are not the same bytes and neither is a record of anything. What is worth keeping out of a Brazilian citation is the document the search returned, not the search.

The Constitution is served by the Chamber of Deputies, which says precisely how current each format is. The Portuguese text, offered as html, as a word processor file, as a PDF and as audio, is labelled as updated to the hundred and thirty-ninth constitutional amendment, of 2026. The English version offered on the same page is labelled as updated to the ninety-second amendment, of 2016. Anyone working in English from that file is working from a document its own publisher dates a decade back, and the label is on the page rather than inside the file, so it is easy to carry the file away without it.

Article 22 of the Constitution puts civil, commercial, criminal, procedural, electoral, agrarian, maritime, aeronautical, space and labour law on the list of subjects the Union alone may legislate on. That is a longer reservation than most federations make, and it is why a Brazilian code is a federal statute in a country whose states legislate widely on much else. Article 84 gives the President the power to sanction, promulgate and cause the laws to be published, along with the power to issue decrees and regulations for their faithful execution, and that is the constitutional hook the gazette hangs from.

That reservation is worth holding beside the reason most people open a Brazilian statute at all. Because civil, commercial, criminal and procedural law belong to the Union, the code a foreign lawyer needs sits in the federal gazette and in the Presidency's own collection rather than in the gazettes of the states. Where the state gazettes become unavoidable is everything article 22 leaves out.

Article 13 settles the language question in a single line: the Portuguese language is the official language of the Federative Republic of Brazil.

A closing note for anyone building a tool rather than reading a page. Planalto serves its consolidated texts in ISO-8859-1, while the Chamber serves the constitutional text with its accented characters written as HTML entities. A pipeline that assumes one encoding across Brazilian government hosts will silently mangle half of what it reads, and a search for a word carrying a tilde will come back empty from a document that contains it.

Primary sources online

SOURCES

  1. Decreto no 9.215, de 29 de novembro de 2017, on the publication of the Diario Oficial da Uniao. Presidencia da Republica, Secretaria-Geral, Subchefia para Assuntos Juridicos. https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/_ato2015-2018/2017/decreto/d9215.htm. Accessed 2026-08-30. The decree that governs how the Brazilian official gazette is published. Article 3 makes the Diario Oficial da Uniao exclusively electronic and published on the Imprensa Nacional site, with free access; its second paragraph requires the Imprensa Nacional to print and keep in its archive at least one copy of each edition, and its third paragraph provides that the absence or lateness of that printed copy does not remove the validity of the publication. Article 4 requires the publication to meet the authenticity, integrity, legal validity and interoperability requirements of the Brazilian public key infrastructure. Article 6 gives the Imprensa Nacional technical autonomy in editing and making the gazette available, subject to fidelity to the originals. Article 10 sets the schedule, and it appears twice: the wording as enacted in 2017 and a later wording beneath it, given by Decreto no 10.031 of 2019, which requires a discretionary day to be a whole day and confines that exception to the federal administration in the Federal District. The page is a consolidated text of the Planalto kind, so the successive wordings of articles 2, 6 and 10 are printed one after another, each followed by a parenthetical naming the decree that gave it. The first quote above is the enacted wording of article 10 and the second is the later one. The words that narrow the exception, no Distrito Federal, are in the cached bytes and are not quoted: the page is served in ISO-8859-1, the accented characters around them decode to the replacement character, and the longest clean run through that clause is one character over the quote floor and starts in the middle of a word. Quoting it would be the shortening this repository's own policy warns about, so the wording is described here instead.
  2. Constituicao da Republica Federativa do Brasil, consolidated text to the 139th constitutional amendment. Camara dos Deputados, Coordenacao de Organizacao da Informacao Legislativa. https://www2.camara.leg.br/atividade-legislativa/legislacao/constituicao1988/arquivos/ConstituicaoTextoAtualizado_EC%20139.html. Accessed 2026-08-30. Trimmed extract of a page of 1,437,136 bytes. Article 13 makes Portuguese the official language of the Federative Republic. Article 22 reserves to the Union alone the power to legislate on civil, commercial, criminal, procedural, electoral, agrarian, maritime, aeronautical, space and labour law, which is why the codes are federal in a federation whose states legislate widely otherwise. Article 84 gives the President the power to sanction, promulgate and cause the laws to be published, and to issue decrees and regulations for their faithful execution.
  3. Constituicao Federal de 1988, the Chamber of Deputies index of the formats it serves. Camara dos Deputados. https://www2.camara.leg.br/atividade-legislativa/legislacao/constituicao1988. Accessed 2026-08-30. The page that says how current each format is. The Portuguese text, in html, docx, pdf and audio, is given as updated to the 139th constitutional amendment of 2026. The English version offered beside it is given as updated to the 92nd amendment of 2016. The transitional provisions are served separately, under a label giving them as updated to the same 139th amendment, although each of the three files that label links, the html, the docx and the pdf, is named for the 136th.

Reviewed 2026-08-31. 3 sources cited on this page.