Justice aboard: every other month, a floating courtroom brings the legal system, and other services, to remote communities in Brazil's Amapa.

• Author: Blore, Shawn

It's a small pig, probably not much more than forty pounds, but as the sheriff lifts it over his shoulder and sets off down the boardwalk of this Amazon fishing village, it lets out a cacophony of screams that bring residents to their doorsteps and scatter parakeets from the nearby palm trees. The screeches continue as the sheriff sets the pig carefully in the bottom of an aluminum motorboat and zooms off, twisting and turning through narrow Amazon back channels to arrive at a small dock at the village of Vila Progresso, where a courthouse rides at anchor.

"That may be the first time I ever had to order the arrest of a pig," says Justice Sueli Pereira Pini, the forty-six-year-old presiding judge of the Justice Boat, a single-room courthouse located on the top deck of an Amazon riverboat, afloat in a channel of the Bailique Archipelago at the mouth of the Amazon River.

Boat and court and judge are part of a program called Itinerant Justice, which Judge Pini created in 1996 in order to bring the structure and services of government to the isolated rain-forest communities of the state of Amapa. Almost like an island, Amapa lies sandwiched between the north bank of the Amazon River and French Guiana. From Brazil, the way to reach the state is by boat or plane. The only road connection is a rough dirt track from French Guiana.

As coordinator of special courts for the state capital, Macapa, Judge Pini oversees a jurisdiction that encompasses nearly twenty-five hundred square miles, making it larger than the U.S. state of Delaware.

The municipality of Macapa includes numerous communities at the far end of precarious dirt roads and other small towns and villages clustered near the mouth of the world's largest river, accessible only by water.

For residents of these isolated communities, the time and cost of a trip to the capital often put justice effectively beyond reach. For towns with road access, the Itinerant Justice program created the Justice Bus, a courthouse on a bus that makes the rounds of the municipality's smaller communities, often holding audiences on the town square.

For the more than six thousand inhabitants of the Bailique Archipelago, Judge Pini created the Justice Boat, an old-style Amazon riverboat with a judge and legal staff onboard. Every other month the boat makes the 125-mile journey downstream to the islands, where it passes a week holding trials and issuing judgments, in this case including the seizure of a small and...