Rephrasing your question, you are asking why is the conditional d.f. of a random vector given by partial derivatives. The answer is available, for example, [**here**][1]. Just as a side note: what you have on mind is a *conditioning*. Therefore you should write $$ \mathbb{P}\left[U_{j}\le u_{j}|U_{1}=u_{1},\ldots, U_{j-1}=u_{j-1}\right] $$ instead of $$ \mathbb{P}\left[U_{j}\le u_{j},U_{1}=u_{1},\ldots, U_{j-1}=u_{j-1}\right] $$ the latter being trivially $0$, given the uniformity of all marginals. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_distribution