This article offers, based on the example of a bankruptcy case (1853–1860) of a tradesman in Porto Alegre, Francisco Ferreira de Almeida, an analysis of the Brazilian
Commercial Code’s application in the first decade of its introduction. The purpose of this analysis is to indicate the variety of possibilities that legal agents had at
their disposal in the judicial process and the restrictions created on these by legal proceedings. From the case of Ferreira de Almeida, we conclude that the legal
system in the years 1850–1860 was characterized by a great complexity of courts, working sometimes in parallel and interacting or communicating in an indirect
way. Even the procedure of the Court of Appeal (Tribunal da Relação) was heavily conditioned by local agents and by the actions taken early in the bankruptcy
proceedings (conciliation and arbitration). Also, the public and private roles of the agents involved in the judicial process blended up and influenced the process,
which still contained elements of the Philippine Ordinances. Consequently, to understand what the legal culture of the Empire was or how courts worked, it is
necessary to study the judicial institutions from the point of view of the administrative and communicative practices of the social agents that composed them.
