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Achieving “neighborhood justice” implies, above all, adequate understanding of the foundations of “judicial distance,” which vary from one context to another. However, physical, psychological, and financial dimensions cannot accurately account for them, unless they are observed in their concrete expressions. In the case of Burkina Faso, the ethnographic observation of legal proceedings, where the accused are illiterate, shows that the reduction of judicial distance, producing “inequities,” requires an adjustment of the institution to demands which its mechanism does not respond to. Attempts to adjust the law by actors of the institution are noticeable; yet they can take place but within a variable perimeter dependent on actors.