STORY AND JUSTIFICATION. AT THE DELIBERATIVE HEART OF A JURY (REGARDING TWELVE ANGRY MEN)

Abstract

Sidney Lumet’s Twelve angry men is considered a master works of legal cinematography. Despite its outstanding austerity of material and narrative means, the film is enormously intriguing from different points of view (psychological, legal, critical). This paper focuses on the argumentative aspect of the trial deliberation, underlining two issues: first, the deconstruction of the prosecution’s story from an epistemic perpective, as well as in its narrative dimension; second, the relation between the context of discovery an the context of justificatión in legal argumentation