ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1990s, a new code of criminal procedure was implemented in Italy, transforming its previous inquisitorial system into a quasi-adversarial one. The cultural change implicit in the transformation provided a unique opportunity for social psychologists to explore how judges, public prosecutors and defence lawyers dealt with the transition to new principles, rules and values. This chapter presents the main results of an investigation carried out with an approach based on the theory of social representations (Berti et al. 1998) and inspired by previous researches on the social representations of justice conducted in France and Portugal (Bonal and Ros 1992; Faugeron and Robert 1978; Rodrigues et al. 1985). Our research aimed to identify the opinions and the cognitive and normative frames shared by judges, public prosecutors and lawyers, as well as their ideas, values, beliefs, and attitudes concerning the criminal proceeding. We explored how the legal professionals define the fundamental ends of criminal justice, their expectations and those they attribute to ordinary people, and their evaluation of the actual working of the criminal system.
