Through historical and spatial analyses of civil causes in Rio de Janeiro's Court, the paper discusses the democratization of the access to justice for the slum dwellers. The analyses were accomplished under two approaches: (1) the individual and collective access to the judicial system; and (2) the positioning of magistrates in their decisions regarding the demands proposed by slum dwellers. The outcomes suggest a relationship between: (a) the increase in the access of slum dwellers to the judiciary and the improvement of the indexes of social development; (b) low incidence of collective demands and neglectful treatment of this kind of action by magistrates; (c) lack of consistency between judicial decisions and the social reality of the favela and the changes it underwent along the past few years. Finally, (d) they bring as well the questioning of some theoretical beliefs about the variables involved in the issue of the "access to justice".
Access to justice; Judicial system; Jurisprudence; Slum; Rio de Janeiro
