Law S Stories

Accounts of law problems and the way they were handled, written by the responsible lawyers

Why do some people not hesitate to call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept the pain and losses associated with defective products, unsuccesful surgery, and discrimination? Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey collected accounts of the law from more than four hundred people of diverse backgrounds in order to explore the different ways that people use and experience it. Their fascinating and original study identifies three common narratives of law that are captured in the stories people tell. One narrative is based on an idea of the law as magisterial and remote. Another views the law as a game with rules that can be manipulated to one's advantage. A third narrative describes the law as an arbitrary power that is actively resisted. Drawing on these extensive case studies, Ewick and Silbey present individual experiences interwoven with an analysis that charts a coherent and compelling theory of legality. A groundbreaking study of law and narrative, The Common Place of Law depicts the institution as it is lived: strange and familiar, imperfect and ordinary, and at the center of daily life.

The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically.This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality?Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.ContributorsJ. M. BalkinPeter BrooksHarlon L. DaltonAlan M. DershowitzDaniel A. FarberRobert A. FergusonPaul GewirtzJohn HollanderAnthony KronmanPierre N. LevalSanford LevinsonCatharine MacKinnonJanet MalcolmMartha MinowDavid N. RosenElaine ScarryLouis Michael SeidmanSuzanna SherryReva B. SiegelRobert Weisberg.

Issues of legal philosophy taught in jurisprudence courses have been pondered by brilliant fiction writers. This anthology brings together forty law-related short stories by writers from various times and places, including Boccaccio, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Kafka, Cather, and Asimov. Divided into five parts--Establishing Laws, The Judicial System, Punishment, Criminal Matters, and Civil Matters--and additional subsections, the stories demonstrate how writers have dealt with topics such as equality, finding the truth, capital punishment, murder, and domestic relations. The section introductions draw upon philosophy, psychology, literature, and law to point to the jurisprudential issues, and also utilize pithy epigraphs for this purpose. Questions are raised, but not answered: the reader is left to reflect on the age-old legal and ethical concerns that continue to trouble and inspire us. This anthology has the ambitious purpose of bringing law in literature to the general public, to practicing attorneys, to students in English or philosophy courses, and to law school students in law and literature courses. Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette has chosen a widely accessible, yet diverse narrative voice. For readers who wish to delve further into the fascinating world of law through literature, the volume concludes with lists of law-related fiction and films.

Simon-Shoshan examines the neglected genre of rabbinic legal stories, arguing that this genre is crucial to understanding both rabbinic jurisprudence and rabbinic story-telling and challenging traditional distinctions between law and literature.