This paper will focus on the perspective of a lexical-semantic, stylistic and terminological analysis, based on the triadic model of Aristotelian rhetoric: pathos, ethos and logos and their interferences in some particular type of defence speech – the judicial pleading. Applying these philosophical categories to argumentative judicial speeches will allow us to determine and to identify a referential linguistic repertoire. Based on a generous factual and representative material, issued from the judicial history of France, we chose to treat in a progressive approach two of the most famous pleadings from the XIXth and the XXth centuries as symbols of the intellectual struggle against injustice, discrimination and judicial error. Establishing a discursive analysis taxonomy based on terminology, stylistic devices, figures of speech, affective syntax and a particular lexical-semantic field we will we will state the observation that the argumentative judicial discourse folds perfectly to a triadic structure, having the quality of being actual, universal and ungoverned by time.