ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with reconstructions of a selection of contemporary approaches to fact-finding, placing this thinking in the Civil Law context of Italy and dwelling in particular on the theory of the construction of factual utterances proposed by the Italian proceduralist Michele Taruffo. From a legal theory perspective in a series of essays that led to his well-known book Rethinking Evidence, William Twining builds on a vision that he describes as “contextualist” or “realist”, the premise that “reality is a social construction and not something out there waiting to be found”. In a perspective of social constructionism, for example, Perret-Clermont is of the opinion that considering the activities within the context in which they take place means considering that the events with which individuals confront one another have a character that is at one and the same time objective, subjective and intersubjective. In a more technical sense, the context of fact construction comprises the process.
