The Law According to Lidia Poët reinterprets the story of Italy’s first female lawyer, the titular character. After being prohibited from practicing law due to her gender, Lidia starts assisting her brother in order to take new cases. The series is now streaming on Netflix.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
In Turin, 1883, Pietro Baiocchi is charged with the murder of the prima ballerina, Adele, of the Theatre D’Angennes. Adele was supposed to marry the Marquis of Clermont.
Pietro’s mother approaches Lidia Poët, a female lawyer, who charges a low fee, and Lidia agrees to take his case. Pietro tells Lidia that he did not kill Adele, as he was in love with her and she reciprocated his feelings.
Soon, the Turin Court of Appeals declares Lidia’s registration to the Bar Association null and void on account of her being a woman. She also gets kicked out of her house by her landlady because she cannot pay the rent.
Left with no choice, she goes to live with her brother, Enrico, who is also a lawyer. Enrico and his wife, Teressa, reluctantly agree to let her stay. Their daughter, Marianna, and Teresa’s journalist brother, Jacopo, also live with them.
Lidia pleads with Enrico to take Pietro’s case, and in return, she promises not to appeal to the court to get reinstated as a lawyer. Enrico agrees to represent Pietro, but Lidia continues to investigate the case on her own.
After examining Adele’s body and following up on a few leads, Lidia realizes Adele had broken off her engagement with the Marquis. She lies to Jacopo, who had written about Lidia in his paper and made her famous, to get him to print about fingerprint testing being used in the case.
She takes her brother and invites the judge to the ballet, hoping to catch the killer red-handed once he comes to erase his fingerprints. Jacopo and Lidia catch the father of the Marquis who arrives at the crime scene to erase his fingerprints and get him to confess in front of the judge.
He killed Adele because she ruined his plans of establishing a good relationship with her father, General Valery, through the marriage of their children. Once Lidia solves the case, Enrico allows her to stay at his house until she gets a job and to work as his assistant for the time being.
An anarchist named Anita is caught with the body of Elena De Santis, the wife of the owner of the chocolate factory where Anita used to work. Anita’s family approaches Enrico with the case, and Lidia takes it in her brother’s absence.
She finds out from Anita that Elena helped her get a job at a tobacco factory. Anita found her bleeding in her carriage and was trying to take her to the hospital when she was caught.
A furious Enrico has no choice but to go along with Lidia’s plans, as she already took the case in his stead. Lidia had requested the use of the volumetric glove, a kind of lie-detecting machine, to prove Anita’s innocence.
Lidia realizes that Anita and Elena were in love, and that is why they were meeting in secret. Furthermore, Elena was the one who ran the factory, not her husband.
Lidia and Jacopo sneak into Elena’s office and find out that she had fired a man named Rodolfo Fumigi, who had been with the owner of the factory since the time the factory was established.
Lidia and Enrico confront Rodolfo in front of the owner and his son. Rodolfo confesses that he killed Elena because she was in a relationship with Anita.
Even though Lidia solves the case, the prosecutor bars her from working as Enrico’s assistant because he believes that Lidia’s brother grants her access to places that are reserved for men.
When a family friend, Vittorio, kills his father, Enrico decides to represent him in court, and Lidia starts investigating on her own. Lidia’s father wanted her to marry Vittorio’s brother, Alberto, but she refused to listen to him.
Lidia’s father sold their house to Alberto’s family after Lidia left them. Lidia, along with Jacopo, enters Vittorio’s house when it is empty and finds a secret room she has never seen before.
She discovers that Alberto lied about going to Nice and hid in the secret room. He killed his father and dragged Vittorio, who was not in his senses because he had been consuming opium, to the room to make it look like he killed their father.
After bringing the truth to light, she shows Enrico an old letter of their father that she had found in the secret room. Their father was in debt to Alberto’s father because he gambled a huge sum of money. Alberto’s father was ready to forget about it if Lidia’s father got her married to Alberto.
Once Enrico discovers the truth, he promises to support Lidia. He wants Lidia to challenge the sentence of the Court of Appeals, and Lidia tells him that she is already working on it.
Lidia sees Jacopo going somewhere at night and follows him. She sees him kissing a woman in an abandoned farmhouse.
Another woman, Miss Sangiacomo, who was able to study and graduate, is accused of killing her professor, Braschi. Lidia wants to take her case. She thinks Miss Sangiacomo is innocent and is being accused because she is a woman who stepped out of the boundary set by society.
Lidia almost proves her innocence, but an old newspaper clipping in Miss Sangiacomo’s room leads her to the conclusion that Braschi and another professor, Borghese, used to experiment with a drug on sex workers, which caused many deaths.
Miss Sangiacomo’s mother was one of the sex workers who died because of the drug. Miss Sangiacomo killed Braschi to get her revenge. Miss Sangiacomo gets acquitted because of Lidia, who had confronted her about lying to her earlier, but she confesses to her crimes in the courtroom at the last minute.
Jacopo helps Lidia with her appeal, and the two sleep together. When Lidia asks him about the woman he met at the abandoned farmhouse and he replies that she was just one of many of his lovers, Lidia asks him to leave.
She then sees him burying something in the garden at night, and digs a hole to find that he had buried guns. When she confronts him about the same, he accuses her of inventing things that do not exist because she is a lonely woman.
Meanwhile, Enrico’s daughter, Marianna, falls in love with the gardener, Lorenzo. Lidia supports her and helps the couple meet secretly. Teresa catches Marianna with Lorenzo, and Enrico has no choice but to fire Lorenzo, which upsets Marianna.
Miss Sangiacomo calls Lidia to meet her in the prison and introduces her to Azzurra, a sex worker who is being framed for the murder of a businessman, Achille Castelnuovo.
Castelnuovo’s business partner, Massimo, held a séance, conducted by Madame Crespal, before Castelnuovo’s death. The spirit that visited them warned Castelnuovo to be aware. Enrico and Lidia ask Madame Crespal to conduct another séance, where they are visited by their father’s spirit.
Lidia believes it to be a sham. In order to trap Massimo, she tells Madame Crespal that Giuditta, Castelnuovo’s sister-in-law who is mentally ill, witnessed Massimo murdering Castelnuovo. When Massimo goes to visit Giuditta, Lidia exposes his crime.
Massimo, who killed his partner because he did not want to share his profits, attacks Lidia, but Enrico arrives there in time with the police.
An upset Marianna runs away from home and goes to Andrea, Lidia’s lover. Lidia goes to bring her home and tells her about her past. Lidia never wanted to leave her parents and run away from home, but her father forced her to leave when she refused to marry Alberto.
She advises Marianna to talk to Enrico instead of running away because, unlike her father, Enrico loves his daughter. Marianna agrees to return home.
Jacopo apologizes to Lidia and tells her that the woman she saw was Nicole. He met Nicole in Paris and loved her in the past, but she fell in love with another man. Jacopo returned home and told everyone that Nicole is dead because he did not want to think about her anymore.
Nicole came to meet him again because she needed his help. She wanted him to sell the guns for her. He tells Lidia that he is helping Nicole, but this is the last time he is doing something that he will regret. He then kisses Lidia.
However, the police come to arrest Jacopo for the murder of Maya, a sex worker he visited frequently, and Lidia helplessly watches as he is taken away.
The Law According to Lidia Poët ending explained in detail:
Do Marianna and Lorenzo end up together?
Marianna tells her parents that she wishes to marry Lorenzo, whose declaration of love convinces Enrico to consider giving their relationship a chance.
Teresa visits Lorenzo and tells him that she cannot give their marriage her blessing. She believes that Marianna will soon get bored of him and regret marrying a poor man. She will fall in love with some other rich man and cheat on Lorenzo.
Teresa tells him that her daughter will break his heart because it is in her nature. She then offers him money to pursue his dreams in exchange for leaving her daughter.
Marianna receives a letter from Lorenzo. She cries and tells her mother that he left her. She now thinks that her mother was right about him all along.
Who killed Maya?
While investigating Maya’s death, Lidia meets General Valery, who tells her that Jacopo was involved with the anarchists in Paris. He had recently gotten two transit documents and entry visas to Uruguay forged. Maya was a spy; her real name was Giorgia, and she was sent to keep an eye on him.
Jacopo admits that he was a member of the anarchists in Paris because Nicole was also an anarchist. However, he returned to Turin when she ran away with Louis.
Nicole and Louis were later arrested. They managed to escape and came to Turin to hide. Nicole reached out to Jacopo, who agreed to help them get to Genoa safely.
Lidia then goes to meet Nicole and Louis to give them the money that Jacopo had gotten after selling the guns that Nicole had given him. Lidia notices a tattoo on Nicole’s arm, which makes her suspicious that there might be a link between her and Maya.
She goes to search Maya’s room and discovers that Maya was also an anarchist in Paris, but she betrayed the other members, which led to their arrest. Nicole and Louis came to Turin to kill her in order to get their revenge.
Lidia gets on the train on which the two are leaving and asks them to confess to their crime. In the following struggle, Louis falls off the train. Nicole then agrees to Lidia’s demands, and Lidia successfully proves Jacopo’s innocence.
Does Lidia leave Turin?
Andrea is moving to New York, and he asks Lidia to go with him, as women are allowed to practice law there. He even buys her a ticket and confesses that he can imagine a happy future with her, but she does not need to see him once they are there.
Lidia’s appeal gets rejected by the High Court, which means she still cannot be a lawyer in Turin. She decides to leave and go to New York with Andrea. She bids goodbye to Jacopo and leaves a letter for Enrico and his family.
When she steps out of the house, she is greeted by several women who applaud her and are there to show their support. She also finds Enrico waiting there for her.
After saying goodbye to Enrico, she walks towards Andrea, who has come to pick her up, but stops at the last minute and turns around, implying that there is a possibility that she decided to stay and fight for her rights in Turin.
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