What do we expect from the legal system? What good does it do? Rather than giving a theoretical answer to questions that we all pose regularly – whenever there’s a trial in the news –  lawyer Antonella Cereghetti opens up her notebooks. Short texts that she started out writing for herself, to keep a record of the destinies she encountered in the exercise of her profession. Both so as not to forget, and to give herself some perspective…
She describes the lives of the women and men, children sometimes, who inhabit court cases. Always unique, sometimes dramatic. And yet, as we read Antonella Cereghetti, who retells them with great humanity, we realize that, paradoxically, these stories concern us, they question how we live together. The lawyer lays bare her questions, shares her convictions. She describes how the courts work on a daily basis, both in her native Switzerland and in several other countries she has visited. We are often disappointed in what she sometimes calls the legal bulldozer. Without providing easy answers, these accounts tend towards a more just system of justice, by highlighting what the basic minimum of the legal system could be: insuring social balance by avoiding the chaos of private vengeance. The lawyer also sometimes includes notes drawn from ordinary life, not tied to any particular case, but that show how the practice of law is woven into the cloth of humanity that gives it heft and color.

Sensitive writing at the service of people who one day find themselves caught up in the twists and turns of a trial. An unusual point of view, the lawyer’s, at once up close and with a certain distance. Antonella Cereghetti’s Notebooks teach us a lot about the daily workings of the courts, and interrogate us about what we expect from them.