Law, Narrative, Narratology - Interdisciplinary Essays

Explores the diverse applications of narrative in law beyond the courtroom, from client-lawyer interactions to legal decisions Once regarded by law professors as serving an ornamental purpose in legal argumentation, narrative has gained an increasingly prominent role in legal scholarship. Yet while scholars have examined the many functions and effects of narrative in legal decisions, courtroom arguments, and the stories we tell about the law, research on law and narrative has generally limited its focus to the most overtly noticeable place for narrative in legal writing—the factual material presented in trials. Law, Narrative, Narratology explores legal narrative in a variety of contexts, including pre-trial litigation, trial argument-framing, legal decisions, human rights law, media reports on court cases, and work advocating for legal change. Taking a comparative approach to the intersections of law, narrative, and narratology, contributors consider various “narrators” of law to make sense of areas of legal argumentation beyond the current scope of narratological-legal research.