Law, Narrative, Narratology - by Simon Stern & Greta Olson

Book Synopsis

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. By examining topics ranging from the distinction between a story's narrative and its discourse to the use of narrative perspective, the essays in this volume illuminate the techniques legal actors use to craft stories, as well as the narrative arcs their interlocutors inhabit.

Editors Greta Olson and Simon Stern have cultivated a collection of essays by global legal and narrative scholars, allowing the volume and its contributors to assess an array of narratological issues across national and international boundaries, and civil and criminal law contexts. Offering a fresh analysis of narrative's uses in the law, Law, Narrative, and Narratology provides a needed expansion of the study of narrative across the justice system.

Review Quotes

"Researchers in the legal humanities may agree that narrative plays an important role in law, but work can be hampered by conceptual imprecision. Law, Narrative, Narratology offers a refreshing and inspiring perspective by virtue of its genuine multivocality and by the important intellectual advances made by the editors and contributing authors."--David Gurnham, author of Crime, Desire, and Law's Unconscious

About the Author

Simon Stern (Editor)
Simon Stern is Professor of Law and English at the University of Toronto and the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities and The Routledge Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America.

Greta Olson (Editor)
Greta Olson is Professor of English and American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen and the author of From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect.