ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the narration of facts evolves from one stage to another of the case reconstruction, with a focus on the role played by the lawyer. In particular, the lawyer is depicted as a translator, whose function is to transform the human story into a legal one. Lawyers’ narratives may have a subversive impact on the pre-defined legal order. The chapter explores the stories of Laura, Luciano and Franco in the versions provided by their attorneys, both in the course of interviews and through the reconstruction of the official records of the legal proceedings. The advocate’s statement of facts is not simply part of the legal argument, but constitutes its very core. Experiments in the ethnography of legal discourse confirm that apparently minor variations in the way a witness gives evidence produce major differences in how that evidence is evaluated with regard to such key factors as the witnesses’ credibility, their competence for testifying and their intelligence.
