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 trained lawyer in Portugal and Brazil. She graduated in Law and Psychology, and received her MSc and PhD in Legal History from the University of Lisbon. She specialises in Women’s Legal History in the Portuguese Empire, and her current research project investigates the conversion of Japanese women to Christianity between 1540s and 1630s from a global legal history perspective. 

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)”, studies the women of colonial Paraíba, a captaincy in north eastern Brazil. Based on daily life cases from archives of Portugal and Brazil, the research shows that the law of the metropole was not simply transplanted to the colony. Instead, it interacted with local normativities, providing options to women depending on the intersection of their status and condition, religion and sexuality. The study demonstrates the flexibility of sex and gender categories according to the practice of law.