Miguel Galvão Teles

Miguel Galvão Teles is still today a major figure in the Portuguese legal landscape – an unparalleled legal genius, characterised by his intelligence, his brilliance, and his eclecticism. Beyond his areas of choice, Constitutional Law and Public International Law, to which he made fundamental contributions, there is virtually no area of legal knowledge that has not benefited from the depth of his thinking.

A lawyer since 1966, with a reputation that extended far beyond Portugal, he was a founding partner of Miguel Galvão Teles & João Soares da Silva, a firm that merged with Morais Leitão, J. Galvão Teles & Associados in 2004. He embodied a law that was completely dedicated to the client, working tirelessly on “defining directions and guidelines, finding and advocating solutions with brilliance and a sense of effectiveness”, in the words of João Soares da Silva.

He was born in Foz do Douro, Porto, in 1939. He graduated from the Law School of the University of Lisbon and had a Master’s Degree in Historical and Legal Sciences. In 1959, he won the Gulbenkian Prize for Political and Economic Sciences and in 1961 the Gulbenkian Prize for Historical and Legal Sciences. He began his academic career as an assistant professor at the Law School of the University of Lisbon in 1963, and five years later he took the Constitutional Law Chair (from 1968 to 1973 and from 1976 to 1978). A jurist in the revolution and democratic transition, he was responsible for the final redaction of the second Constitutional Agreement Platform, of 1976, guiding the country towards constitutional democracy with the reorganisation of political power. He specifically created the Constitutional Commission, the institution that preceded the Constitutional Court, founded in 1982.  From 1982 to 1986, he sat on the Council of State.

Miguel Galvão Teles had extensive experience in the area of litigation and arbitration. He appeared before the International Court of Justice (he represented Portugal against Australia in the “Timor Gap” case) and in International Arbitration Tribunals. He was a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.

Miguel Galvão Teles received the Portuguese honorific titles Grã-Cruz da Ordem do Infante D. Henrique in 1986 and Grã-Cruz da Ordem Militar de Cristo in 2004. His distinguished career was honoured internationally in 2006, when he was awarded the Chambers’ Lifetime Achievement Award by the reputable legal publication Chambers and Partners.

In addition to his distinguished career as a lawyer, Miguel Galvão Teles stood out for his enormous passion for “his” Sporting Club de Portugal. In 1995, he took over the Presidency of the Board of the General Meeting, a position he held with great distinction for about 11 years, alongside four different Chairmen.