Higina Castelo is a Portuguese judge since 1993; appellate judge since 2016, currently sitting at Lisbon Court of Appeal (Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa), Civil Cases Section. She graduated in Law from the Lisbon School of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in 1990, and holds a PhD in Private Law from the Faculty of Law of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa , with a thesis about intermediation contracts. Higina is also researcher at CEDIS (Researching Centre on Law and Society from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa), and author of several articles and monographs, published in journals and books, mainly about Contract Law. Her main interests are Legal Theory, Comparative Law and Adjudication concerning socio-economic relationships between private parties, influences from both adjudication and socio-economic relationships in Law development, constraints in the process of legal reasoning.