This chapter is a report on the first stage of a long journey through the field of law in society. I analyse how, today and in retrospect, I see the historical and political context of the Law and Modernization Program [L&MP] at Yale University in the early 1970s. On the dark side, the L&MP was part of an imperialist project that focused on US economic, geopolitical, and national security interests. Beyond the surface of official declarations, the funders of the Program had little concern for the rule of law and even less for democracy. Then, as now, academics coming from outside the core of the world system to participate in these types of programmes have to play the game. Most of them are eager to do so. Others, like myself and many of my fellow students, see the game as a contested terrain that allows for contradiction and points of leakage through which it is possible to carry out one’s academic work with mental reservations whilst preserving integrity. On the bright side, as a project-in-action, and thanks to its directors, the L&MP allowed us to build a scientific community, a sense of being part of a plural, independent, free, and collective endeavour that was leading to a new field within the social sciences in which critical sociology was far from marginal. There was an overflowing excitement that inscribed itself forever in our personal and academic lives.

Pasargada is the fictitious name of a squatter settlement (or favela) in Rio de Janeiro. Because of the structural inaccessibility of the state legal system, and especially because of the illegal character of the favelas as urban settlements, the popular classes living in them devise adaptive strategies aimed at securing the minimal social ordering of community relations. One such strategy involves the creation of an internal legality, parallel to - and sometimes conflicting with - state official legality. This chapter describes Pasargada legality from the inside-through the sociological analysis of legal rhetoric in dispute prevention and dispute settlement and in its (unequal) relations with the Brazilian official legal system. My objective is to reveal many legal experiences that, because they do not fit the legal modernist canon, are ignored, marginalized, silenced, in a word, wasted.