One week after Lawyer’s Day, we continue our tribute to legal professionals, this time from a different perspective.
The fellowship of writers trained in law reminds us that the practice of law — and, particularly, criminal lawyering — requires more than technical expertise. It demands sensitivity to understand the other, creativity to find new paths, and, above all, mastery of words.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that so many jurists have found in literature a second form of expression. Law and literature share a common substance: words and the ability, through them, to make someone see what had previously remained hidden.
Criminal Lawyering and the Search for Paths
Borrowing the words of Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, everything is experienced for the first time and without preparation, as though an author were stepping onto a stage without ever having rehearsed.
There is something of that same condition in criminal lawyering.
Each case presents its own circumstances, different people, unrepeatable events. There is no script that can be followed in its entirety. Faced with what is presented, one must imagine and see what has not yet been put forward.
If argument A is rejected, argument B is raised. Strategy C is deployed. A new passage is sought when the first door closes.
Criminal lawyering therefore demands a constant exercise of construction. It is the search for possible paths — including those that have not yet been travelled.
But the creativity of the defense does not lie in creating the facts. It lies in knowing how to present them.
This requires technical knowledge. But it also requires empathy. It requires knowing how to organize the facts, choosing what needs to be said, recognizing what cannot be left aside, and constructing a sequence capable of leading the judge along the same path followed by the defense.
Far from simply “creating a narrative,” lawyering means finding the appropriate way to present a reality.
Mineirinho and Criminal Lawyering
Lawyer’s Day also offers an opportunity to reflect on those who came before us and continue to inspire the struggle of criminal defense lawyers.
In 1962, Clarice Lispector wrote Mineirinho, a chronicle published in the Rio de Janeiro magazine Senhor. In it, she takes a concrete event — the execution of José Miranda Rosa, known as Mineirinho, by police officers linked to the so-called Death Squad — and transforms it into something far greater than an account of a violent death.
Clarice does not merely tell us what happened.
She places us before the event.
And, above all, she forces us to ask where we are looking from.
The strength of the chronicle lies precisely in this displacement. The reader no longer remains before Mineirinho as though before a distant character, defined only by the crime attributed to him. Little by little, the distance disappears. The death of the other begins to reach us.
It is at this point that Clarice’s literature meets criminal lawyering.
Because defending someone does not mean ignoring the facts, nor denying the seriousness of an accusation. It means, above all, preventing a person from being reduced to what they are accused of.
A legal argument, however technical or sophisticated, cannot stand on its own. Facts, however serious, do not speak for themselves either: they must be understood, organized, and subjected to the appropriate legal framework.
It is along this fine — and, at times, unsteady — line that criminal lawyering stands.
Between the technical and the human. Between the rule and reality. Between what is written in the case file and what exists beyond it.
It is the lawyer’s task to weave these two dimensions together.
To ensure that the legal does not lose sight of the human. And to allow the human to be understood through the lens of the law.
Perhaps this is one of the most beautiful ways to understand criminal lawyering: not as the art of fabricating versions of events, but as the art of finding, among the many possible paths, the one that allows a person to be truly seen.
