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.