Speaking the Law Without a Voice: Lidia Poët and The Politics of Representation

This paper examines the Netflix historical legal drama The Law According to Lidia Poët through the intersections of feminist legal criticism, representation theory, and detective narrative traditions. Set in nineteenth-century Italy and inspired by the life of Italy’s first female lawyer, the series presents a protagonist whose intellectual capabilities repeatedly challenge the institutional structures that attempt to silence her. Although Lidia Poët possesses legal training, analytical precision, and investigative insight, she is denied the right to practise law within a judicial system shaped by patriarchal authority. The series therefore constructs a paradox in which a woman central to the production of legal knowledge remains excluded from its official performance.
The paper argues that the narrative moves beyond a conventional story of individual resistance and instead exposes the deeper mechanisms through which institutions regulate visibility, legitimacy, and authority. Through courtroom sequences, investigative cases, domestic interactions, and visual framing, the series demonstrates how women historically participated in legal and intellectual spaces while remaining structurally unacknowledged within them. Particular attention is given to the politics of representation, the invisibility of female intellectual labour, and the relationship between gender and institutional speech. The paper also studies how the series reimagines the detective figure through feminine modes of observation, empathy, and social reading, thereby complicating traditional masculine models of legal and investigative authority.
By analysing dialogue, character dynamics, costume, spatial framing, and courtroom performance, this paper explores how The Law According to Lidia Poët transforms the legal drama into a broader critique of gendered exclusion. Ultimately, the study suggests that the series positions voice not merely as speech, but as the right to participate in the production of truth itself.

Feminist Legal Criticism, representation, Gender and Law

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