As a demonstration of the political choices available to the educated Portuguese elite at the end of the 18th century, as well as of what could be said and what was permissible to be said in the teaching of "the Law of the Fatherland" at the University of Coimbra, the language and arguments of the "Prelecções" of Nogueira legitimated the growth of royal law-making and the submission of the courts to the decisions of a Reformist Absolutism. The concepts of "police" and "economy" were used to denote spheres in which the monarch, equated by implication with the father of a family in the governance of the "great house" which was the kingdom, might make ordinances, precepts and rules of conduct, without the restrictions which judicial tradition had imposed on royal practices since the Middle Ages.
Police; The Law of the Fatherland; Ricardo R. Nogueira