top of page
  • Susy Menis

The untold story of the first Italian-Turinese female lawyer

The Netflix nineteenth-century period drama The Law According to Lidia Poet presents the adventures of a young Italian law graduate in her pursuit of solving murder cases. Lidia Poet is not a fictional character, but very little is known about her journey to become a lawyer- and the series only adds a little to this knowledge. This review has several aims. First, it will reconsider the implications of reel history. Second, it will add some context to Netflix’s introduction of Lidia Poet and compare her experiences accessing the legal profession with her English colleagues, such as Bertha Cave and Gwyneth Bebb. Attention will be paid to the courts’ rejections of their appeals.


Read the article on Law and Humanities.

Recent Posts

See All

How to write a positivist legal history

How to write a positivist legal history: lessons from Blackstone and J.F. Stephen. Histories. 1, 2021, 169-183. This paper is about shaping the law understood as a positivist enterprise. Positivist la

Adultery as a Defence

Adultery as a Defence: The Construction of a Legally Permissible Violence, England 1810. Histories. 3(2) 2023, 76-97. Mawgridge’s case in 1707 set a precedent where adultery was recognised as a justif

bottom of page