Access to Justice, New Technologies and Old Dilemmas:

Abstract

This work is a brief exposition of the concept of citizenship described by T.H. Marshall and the relationship between this category - present in the Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil 1988 as the foundation of our Democratic State of Law and present in our legal discourse as a fundamental right of access to justice - and recent forms of virtual access to the judiciary. With technological innovations and the virtualization of the Brazilian justice system, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, access to justice has undergone technological changes and has begun to be seen from a new perspective in the field of law, with the aim of facilitating people in the judicialization of social demands and monitoring of legal proceedings. However, in this context, there is the issue of procedural acts carried out virtually due to financial hyposufficiency or digital illiteracy, which has caused a new barrier between society and the Judiciary, with the consequent lack of access to justice. In the course of the text we analyze and describe empirical research carried out in this digital scenario of the Judiciary, especially in the state of Rio de Janeiro and the state of Santa Catarina, which problematize the virtual process in different places and yet converge in their reflections.  The aim of this work is to problematize how the legal institute of citizenship is repeatedly updated in a peculiar way by Brazilian society.