Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva is legal historian specialising in women's history. She is currently a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and a lecturer in Legal History at EBS Universität. She studied in Law and Psychology, and holds an MSc and a PhD in Legal History from the University of Lisbon. She is also a qualified lawyer in Portugal and Brazil. Her research focuses on on women’s legal history in the Iberian empires. Her current research project investigates the conversion of Japanese women to Christianity between 1540s and 1630s from a global legal history perspective, drawing on extensive multilingual archival research in Japan, Portugal, Spain, the United States, and India.

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Her book on women’s legal history in colonial Brazil, titled Nem teúdas, nem manteúdas: História das Mulheres e Direito na capitania da Paraíba (Brasil, 1661–1822), examines the lives of women in the Captaincy of Paraíba, in northeastern Brazil. Drawing on everyday legal cases preserved in archives in Portugal and Brazil, the book demonstrates that metropolitan law was not simply transplanted to the colony but interacted with local normative practices. These interactions shaped the options available to women according to the intersections of their status and condition, religion, and sexuality. The study also demonstrates how the meanings and application of sex and gender categories could shift through legal practice. 

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Her journal articles have appeared in Journal of Religious History, Varia Historia, Luso-Brazilian Review, Iberoamericana, Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History, Portuguese Studies Review, and Women’s History Review. She has also contributed to reference works, including Oxford handbooks, encyclopedias, and bibliographies. In addition, she has edited a volume with Brill on legal change in the Iberian world.

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