The Houses of Law and Justice are, among others, one of the new devices prepared by the french state to answer to youngsters’ petty delinquency. Recently institutionalized, they were local experiences developed by the public prosecutor’s departments, in relation with local elected politicians and City’s policy representatives. Through the development of ethnographic work in the region of Paris during the year of 2001, we got interested in the social sense of juridical complaints treated in the Houses of Law and Justice, namely those coming from the “stable” fractions of popular classes and those coming from institutional agents. The observation of hearings and the interviews made to different representatives of the public prosecutor’s department working in HLJ made us reflect about the way the judicial institution answers to these uses of law and the goals they create in its interior. Finally, we wanted to highlight one of the indirect social effects of this type of intervention involving the parents of the youngster
