As an active intellectual in national public life, Luiz Werneck Vianna was an excellent analyst of the national situation. In his career, like few others, he knew how to align the brazilian modernization process with nuances that were often unprecedented. This is the case of the Judiciary, the object of its investigations since the 1990s. Thus, the rigorous analytical approach, which was peculiar to it, presented new characters from the then little observed legal world as an object of social research. This text, integrated into the dossier in his honor, intends to address the course of the process of judicialization of politics and social relations, following the steps pioneered by the team he led. The point here will be to indicate an important change in the pattern of analyzes in relation to the Judiciary, particularly due to a possible inflection throughout the 2000s, which would have the potential to impact the relationship that State and society had been establishing.