Studies on Marcelo Caetano have primarily focused on his political career within the Estado Novo (initially emerging as an enthusiast of corporatism), his doctrinal significance in the areas of Administrative and Constitutional Law and his work as an educator. However, Marcelo Caetano also left behind a significant body of work as a historian such fields as the history of law and its institutions, medieval courts, central, local and corporate administrative organisation, administrative coding and Portuguese colonial administration.

A historian equipped with rigorous analytical methods, and who cultivated the supremacy of the written document, primarily legal documents (capable of inserting them into a scholarly framework), Caetano always allied his foundation of legal training to historical thought, singularly translated in the assertion that, "problems of law always offer three distinct aspects: historical, political and technical/legal" (Estudos de História da Administração Pública Portuguesa, Studies of the History of Portuguese Public Administration, 1994, p.451). In this sense, as noted by Jorge Borges de Macedo, "his studies were, first and foremost, usually had grounds outside the field of history: they aimed to analyse legal problems, which Marcelo believed demanded a rigorous and complete background treatment, where the factor of time had much to say, in order to grasp a sufficient margin of experience to unwaveringly include the array of the occurrence" (Marcelo Caetano historiador, Historian Marcelo Caetano p. 10). José Adelino Maltez emphasised that Caetano as a historian is largely a reflection of Caetano the jurist, in that "there is no universal and temporal content of law: what is categorised in the form of the law must be regarded historically according to its time and place" (História do Direito Português, Fontes direito público: 1140-1495, History of Portuguese Law, Public Law Sources: 1140-1495, 1981, p. 14). Historical fact is thus a hallmark of the author's thinking, a condition of understanding the background and evolution of the realities that constitute the subject he was interested in as a historian. But historical fact, according to Marcelo Caetano, could not be understood without observation and the combination of various social and economic factors, beyond the strictly political, which would be important in structuring his thinking and historiographical criteria. Demonstrative of this reality, as well as the author's unceasing pedagogical concern, Caetano explains his entire method of analysis and study in his book Monografias sobre os concelhos portugueses (Monographs on the Portuguese Municipalities, 1935), especially dedicated to students of the topic.

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