Abstract
This article proposes a new view on land ownership in Brazil. Various interpretations on the question of land ownership began with the publication of Law No. 601, the Land Law, of September 18, 1850, after almost 30 years of debates and parliamentary proposals. From the nineteenth century, with Augusto Teixeira de Freitas ́ work of 1882, called Land and Colonization, .... until today there has been systematic academic discussion regarding the Land Law and property issues, traversing the legal paths and shortcuts, the theoretical discussions about the meaning and scope of the legislation, the possibilities of its application, the exceptions to its applicability, and local case studies in almost all Brazilian states. It is not our objective to analyze the historiography about the Land Law, or the existing theoretical-methodological positions on the subject, because although we are presenting a text on rural property, we chose to explore the period that preceded the law, to demonstrate how common people solved property issues prior to the legislation. We shall show that the notion of private property was already established in social practice in this period of a normative vacuum on the subject.