During the 20th Century (especially since the end of the 1940s), many national constitutions, international documents and human rights treaties explicitly recognized a so-called right of access to justice, in various degrees of scope and coverage. And yet, the concrete articulation of the basic principles that should govern the effective allocation of the right of access to justice has proved difficult and uncertain. Constitutional courts on one side, national legislators and political activists on the other, have often stumbled on difficult problems. This paper argues that a capabilities approach (CA, for short) has much to say in guiding the difficult political questions that lurk behind judicial, political and social interventions in the field. In a nutshell, the argument is this: we are well advised to interpret the provision of equal access to justice as an instrument for the protection of people’s capabilities, both within as well as beyond the legal process itself. When the need for tragic choices in prioritizing litigants or classes of cases arises, we are well advised to use two conceptual tools recently elaborated within a CA, and allocate, for example, the right to legal aid for a particular class of litigants or areas of law in light of its fertility in promoting the parties substantive achievements both within and beyond the legal process itself, or the corrosiveness of the disadvantages caused by not providing it. The paper has four sections. The first section provides a short introduction to a CA, presenting its vocabulary and speculating on its reach in guiding practical thought in the field of access to justice. The second section closely comments on the decisions by the US Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights that provide the general framework of constitutional protections for indigent parties in the US and in Europe. The third section introduces two observation-concepts that have been recently developed within a CA, and that might prove especially useful in the field of access to justice and, in particular, for allocating the right to legal aid to indigent parties —namely, the concepts of «fertile capability» and «corrosive disadvantage». The fourth section concludes.