ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on an instrumental use of certain key legal concepts during the early stage of left-wing terrorist activity in the 1970s, in order to highlight how legal language is appropriated by all the main actors: the state, the terrorists and the victims themselves. The entire debate is always tainted by legal rhetoric: the state is at once created by, and creator of, law; the state cannot exist without the law, and the law cannot exist without the state — whatever form each of those entities takes. It is therefore natural that the attack on the state should be perceived as an attack against the law, specifically lo stato di diritto (the 'rule of law'). Some of the values to be subverted, and especially the idea of rule of law, due process and so on, are values which are very much part of the terrorists' own heritage, and which therefore unsurprisingly tend to re-emerge in the terrorists' own rhetoric.
