ABSTRACT
The construction of female law-breakers within the discourses of domesticity, sexuality, and pathology by judicial, medical, and welfare personnel is a unifying theme of this study, but one of the unique contributions of solicitors to this construction is their authorization, within legal and judicial discourse, to recognize the guilty mind. The term ‘recognize’ is not used here to imply any positivistic imperative to search out ‘the truth’. On the contrary, the ideology of legal representation releases the solicitor from any such moral obligation. The relationship between solicitors and their clients (whether male or female) is determined by the legal condition that solicitors must suspend any inclination to disbelieve what their clients say. Legal representation is constructed as being morally neutral; lawyers are engaged for their technical expertisefor their knowledge of the law and their ability to articulate the application of its principles to a particular case. Their desire to obtain a favourable outcome for their clients stems from professional disinterest and not from any personal commitment to, or even belief in, the client’s reading of events. ‘Recognition’ here refers to the process whereby solicitors construct a coherent unity (viz. mens rea) out of the contradictions that surface from efforts to address the Other of legal discourse, namely, the organization of the difference that constitutes the ‘guilt/innocence’ distinction.
