BYU Law Storytelling Event Held March 18: BYU LawStories

Some news on storytelling and legal education via AALS and Cision.  BYU Law held its first storytelling initiative on March 18. Ten invited participants, selected from 40 submitters, presented nonfiction narratives explaining the links between their lives and the law at BYU LawStories.  More here. 

Narrative and Metaphor in the Law: Forthcoming From Cambridge University Press @CambridgeUP @ArsScripta

Forthcoming from Cambridge University Press: Narrative and Metaphor in the Law (Michael Hanne and Robert Weisberg, eds., 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

It has long been recognized that court trials, both criminal and civil, in the common law system, operate around pairs of competing narratives told by opposing advocates. In recent years, however, it has increasingly been argued that narrative flows in many directions and through every form of legal theory and practice. Interest in the part played by metaphor in the law, including metaphors for the law, and for many standard concepts in legal practice, has also been strong, though research under the metaphor banner has been much more fragmentary. In this book, for the first time, a distinguished group of legal scholars, collaborating with specialists from cognitive theory, journalism, rhetoric, social psychology, criminology, and legal activism, explore how narrative and metaphor are both vital to the legal process. Together, they examine topics including concepts of law, legal persuasion, human rights law, gender in the law, innovations in legal thinking, legal activism, creative work around the law, and public debate around crime and punishment. Takes the form of nine conversations between pairs of eminent scholars in different disciplines Opens up discussion for the first time of the joint roles of narrative and metaphor in the law Topics include legal persuasion, gender in the law, judicial opinions and public debate around crime and punishment

Contents include:

Introduction Michael Hanne and Robert Weisberg

1. Narrative, metaphor and concepts of justice and legal systems Greta Olson and Lawrence Rosen

2. Narrative and metaphor in legal persuasion Michael R. Smith and Raymond W. Gibbs

3. Narrative and metaphor in judicial opinions Simon Stern and Peter Brooks

4. Narrative, metaphor and gender in the law Linda L. Berger and Kathryn M. Stanchi

5. Narrative, metaphor and innovations in legal thinking Roberto H. Potter

6. Narrative and metaphor in public debate around crime and punishment Dahlia Lithwick and L. David Ritchie

7. Narrative and metaphor in human rights law Katherine Young and Bernadette Meyler

8. Narrative and metaphor in creative work around the law Lawrence Joseph and Meredith Wallis

9. Narrative and metaphor in legal activism Mari Matsuda.

Narration as Argument: A New Book From Springer Publishing @springerpub

Newly published: Narration as Argument (Paula Olmos, ed., Springer, 2017).

This book presents reflections on the relationship between narratives and argumentative discourse. It focuses on their functional and structural similarities or dissimilarities, and offers diverse perspectives and conceptual tools for analyzing the narratives’ potential power for justification, explanation and persuasion. Divided into two sections, the first Part, under the title “Narratives as Sources of Knowledge and Argument”, includes five chapters addressing rather general, theoretical and characteristically philosophical issues related to the argumentative analysis and understanding of narratives. We may perceive here how scholars in Argumentation Theory have recently approached certain topics that have a close connection with mainstream discussions in epistemology and the cognitive sciences about the justificatory potential of narratives. The second Part, entitled “Argumentative Narratives in Context”, brings us six more chapters that concentrate on either particular functions played by argumentatively-oriented narratives or particular practices that may benefit from the use of special kinds of narratives. Here the focus is either on the detailed analysis of contextualized examples of narratives with argumentative qualities or on the careful understanding of the particular demands of certain well-defined situated activities, as diverse as scientific theorizing or war policing, that may be satisfied by certain uses of narrative discourse.

Link to the Table of Contents.

Nanasi on Domestic Violence Asylum and the Victimization Narrative

Natalie Nanasi, Southern Methodist University School of Law, has published Domestic Violence Asylum and the Perpetuation of the Victimization Narrative. Here is the abstract.

Pitiful. Helpless. Powerless. The words often used to describe survivors of domestic violence conjure a vivid and specific image of a woman lacking both strength and agency. These (mis)conceptions stem from the theories of “Battered Woman Syndrome” and “learned helplessness,” developed in 1979 by psychologist Lenore Walker, who hypothesized that intimate partner abuse ultimately causes a woman to resign herself to her fate and cease efforts to free herself from violence or dangerous situations. Although widely criticized, learned helplessness has permeated the legal establishment, for example, serving as the foundation for mandatory arrest and “no drop” policies in the criminal sphere of domestic violence law. Legal scholars have examined the problematic impacts of both the theory of learned helplessness itself and its effect on survivors in the criminal and civil justice systems. This article adds to that important conversation by exploring the previously unexamined area of learned helplessness’ impact on immigration, specifically asylum, law. Through a series of cases from 1996 to 2014, it is now established that a woman may receive asylum protection if she can establish that she is “unable to leave” a violent domestic relationship. This formulation fits squarely within Walker’s framework, as it requires a victim to advance a narrative of helplessness if she is to obtain refuge in the United States. Furtherance of the notion of Battered Woman Syndrome in asylum law is troubling for a number of reasons, namely, as this piece details, in the harms that can result when survivors of domestic violence are required to conform to a specific “stock story” (including injury to both those who fit the stereotype and those who do not). Additionally, continued adherence to and reliance on learned helplessness poses challenges for client-centered lawyering, perpetuates the tendency of victim-blaming, ignores the realities of the dangers of separation violence, and furthers the damaging dichotomy of “worthy” and “unworthy” immigrants. By identifying these concerns and proposing alternative bases for protection that would encompass not just pitiable and vulnerable victims of domestic violence, but strong, empowered and capable fighters against domestic abuse, this article seeks to critique, rebut and prevent the infiltration of static and stereotypical images of battered women in the realm of immigration law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Lenora Ledwon On the Graphic Novel and Legal Storytelling

Lenora F. Ledwon, St. Thomas University School of Law, is publishing Understanding Visual Metaphors: What Graphic Novels Can Teach Lawyers About Visual Storytelling in volume 63 of Drake Law Review (2015). Here is the abstract.

During the 2008 presidential election, a powerful image circulated in the media: an illustration of presidential candidate Barack Obama as Superman. In the illustration, titled Time for a Change, Obama is dressed in a suit and tie and stands in the iconic pose of Clark Kent changing into Superman. He is ripping open his shirt to reveal a superhero costume underneath, but instead of an S for Superman, his costume features a large O for Obama. The image references both Obama's campaign slogan, "Change," and the changing-clothes/changing-identities moment in Superman comic books when the mild-mannered Clark Kent transforms into a superhero. This single image tells a resonant story about a seemingly ordinary man who has extraordinary abilities and it taps into our psychological desire for a hero or savior to help in troubled times. It also daringly addresses the subtext of race in the election by portraying the most American of superheroes, Superman, as a black man. This artwork, created by well-known comic book and graphic novel illustrator Alex Ross, is a visual metaphor. It is no coincidence that this powerful image is rooted in the world of graphic novels because graphic novels are replete with visual metaphors, and the genre itself is characterized by visual storytelling. Lawyers can learn a great deal from the visual storytelling in such images. Specifically, this Article suggests that lawyers can improve their visual literacy and become better visual storytellers by studying graphic novels.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Anat Rosenberg On the History of Genres in Law and Literature

Anat Rosenberg, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliyah, Radzyner School of Law, has published The History of Genres: Reaching for Reality in Law and Literature at 39 Law & Social Inquiry 1057 (2014). Here is the abstract.

Genres are historical formations; their ability to generate knowledge depends on their interrelationships within a culture. Since law, too, can be viewed as a genre, studies of specific historical relationalities between law and other genres are necessary for law’s own history and theory. This essay discusses differentiations between Victorian law and literature, starting out from the recent publication of Ayelet Ben-Yishai’s Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Law and Fiction (2013), which reveals some of that history. I examine two points: differentiations in legal and literary approaches to probabilistic knowledge, and differentiations in the author functions in law and literature. These differentiations bear multiple implications. I discuss implications for evidence-law debates about probabilistic evidence, for contract-law debates about the centrality of autonomy and self-authorship, and for understandings of legal reasoning itself — the elusive notion of “thinking like a lawyer.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

How Ronald Reagan Communicated

New post from John Denvir's Guile Is Good blog on Ronald Reagan, the "Great Communicator." More here.

The Language of Race In "New York Times v. Sullivan"

Carlo A. Pedrioli, Barry University, has published New York Times v. Sullivan and the Rhetorics of Race: A Look at the Briefs, Oral Arguments, and Opinions at 7 Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives 109 (2015). Here is the abstract.

Given the strife of the Civil Rights Movement that surrounded the case, this article looks back at the use of race in New York Times v. Sullivan. Specifically, the article examines how the advocates, led by Herbert Wechsler for the Times, I. H. Wachtel, William Rogers, and Samuel Pierce for the four ministers, and Roland Nachman for Sullivan, dealt with race in their rhetorics to the Court, both in their merits briefs and their oral arguments, and also how the justices used race in their opinions. Although Justice William Brennan did not explicitly focus on race in his opinion for the Court, the racial context that framed the case was hard to ignore, and Brennan, in ultimately resolving the case without remanding it to the Alabama courts for further proceedings, did not completely ignore race. Additionally, Justice Hugo Black, a native of Alabama, discussed race explicitly and at more length in his concurring opinion, and Justice Arthur Goldberg briefly mentioned race. Overall, the article aims to provide a better understanding of some of the rhetorical choices that may be available to legal advocates and members of the bench regarding complex topics like race.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Basics of Narrative

Harold Anthony Lloyd, Wake Forest University School of Law, has published Narrative in Law and Life: Some Frequently Asked Questions in The Second Draft (Fall 2015). Here is the abstract.

This article briefly addresses the following questions: Why should we study narrative? Does narrative have a basic overarching form or forms? How does framing drive narrative? How do concepts drive narrative? What can we do when we lack the necessary concepts for the narrative we need to tell? Are there basic storylines that repeat? Are there basic character types that we reuse? Can narrative drive the results of a Supreme Court case? Can narrative drive transactional practice? How does narrative's importance underscore the importance of an education in the humanities?

Download the text from SSRN at the link.

Narrative In Trial Discourse

Marcelo C. Galuppo, UC Minas; Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and University of Baltimore School of Law, has published Mimesis, Imagination and Law. Here is the abstract.

This paper assumes that a trial consists of a narrative that encompasses other narratives held in the Lawsuit. As such, the first question that arises is whether it is possible to transpose events into discourse, i.e., if it is possible to represent mimetically the reality in the judicial discourse. In order to this narrative process be legitimate, it needs to present narrative coherence so that it makes possible that other narratives (plaintiff`s, defendant's, and witnesses' ones) be understood as dialectically overcame in sentence’s narrative. Imagination plays a key role in narratives, and especially in judicial narratives, linking the events, disconnected and isolated in themselves, into a coherent, meaningful whole. This paper assumes that not only the phenomenology of trials can be better understood if one takes them at as a narrative, but also that Judge's (and Jury's) imagination plays a major role in building the meaning of this narrative. This perspective also rejects the traditional positivistic view that court decision may be an objective description (neutral) of the facts involved in the case.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Legal Narrative and State of Mind

Cathren Koehlert-Page, Barry University School of Law, has published A Look Inside the Butler's Cupboard: How the External World Reveals Internal State of Mind in Legal Narratives at 69 N.Y.U. Ann. Surv. Am. L. 441 (2014). Here is the abstract. 

In Remains of the Day, Mr. Stevens the butler guards his pantry well and does not allow the housekeeper to be "coming and going." When Ms. Kenton intrudes on his private time and wants to see the novel he is reading, he resists. Mr. Stevens's internal monologue about the pantry and all of his interaction with Ms. Kenton reveal his state of mind. A reserved person, Mr. Stevens never comes out and says, "I have feelings for Ms. Kenton, but I am so afraid to let her in. She might wreak havoc on my heart." In fact, most of us are not so constantly self-aware of our emotional states. Thus, in story, the character's interaction with the external world reveals the internal state of mind. The pantry is Stevens' internal world -- it is his well-guarded heart.

In legal narratives, it is even more important to have some sort of concrete proof of internal states of mind. We must prove pain and suffering, emotional distress, intent, insanity, and so on. Simply asserted, "I am suffering," is not convincing and is conclusory. Worse still, the attorney could write, "Bethany was so very sad. She was suffering deep down to her core, and it pained her so." Such a declaration is melodramatic and conclusory.

However, if we view the manner in which Bethany interacts with the world as she suffers, we can feel the emotional weight of that suffering. The alarm goes off, and she turns it off and pulls the covers over her head. She lays in bed and cries all day long. She wants to drag herself to the kitchen to scarf down a pint of ice cream, but each time she tries to roll over, pain shoots down her back...and so on.

This article defines these objective correlatives, shows the difference between them and other writing concepts, and provides examples of effective and ineffective objective correlatives in both fiction narratives and legal narratives.
Some of the fiction works explored included Anna Karenina, Inexcusable, Hamlet, Bud Not Buddy, State of Wonder, and Every Time a Rainbow Dies.

The brief to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the recent controversial death penalty case, Panetti v. Quarterman is also explored. Mr. Panetti argued that he was not competent to be executed, and his attorney's brief uses Panetti's incoherent connection to the external world to show his incompetent mental state.

Some of the other examples include U.S. v. Johnson and Davis v. Washington.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Legal Reasoning, Rules, and Narrative

Stephen Paskey, State University of New York, Buffalo, Law School, is publishing The Law is Made of Stories: Erasing the False Dichotomy between Stories and Legal Rules in volume 11 of Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: JALWD (Fall 2014). Here is the abstract.

When lawyers think of legal analysis, they think chiefly of logic and reason. Stories are secondary. As Michael Smith explains, our legal system “is not founded on narrative reasoning” but on “a commitment to the rule of law.” The article suggests that this dichotomy between “rule-based reasoning” and “narrative reasoning” is false, and that narrative and stories are central to legal reasoning, including rule-based reasoning. In doing so, the article uses literary narrative theory to show that every governing legal rule has the structure of a “stock story”: the elements of the rule correspond to elements of a story. It follows that lawyers do not rely on stories simply because they are persuasive. They do so because a story is literally embedded in the structure of governing rules, and those rules can be satisfied only by telling a story. Thus, many analytical moves we label “rule-based reasoning” can be understood as a type of narrative reasoning, in which a client’s story is compared to and contrasted with the stock story embedded in the rule.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Images of the Mexican In Law and Narrative

Deborah M. Weissman, University of North Carolina, School of Law, is publishing The Politics of Narrative: Law and the Representation of Mexican Criminality in the Fordham International Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

Popular narratives often develop in tandem with and within the law and legal discourse. They are both cause and consequence of public mood. This Article addresses the emergence of widely held perceptions of the “Mexican-as-criminal” and Mexico as crime-ridden violence society. It analyzes the narrative as it bears on public policy, national interest, and the formulation of law.
The Article examines the discursive framework of the Mexican-as-criminal at the transnational, national, and local level. It considers how the political use of such constructs act to shape immigration policies through the construction of law that is, in turn, constitutive of the narrative. It then explores alternative uses of the discourse often by well-meaning advocates who avail themselves of the perception of Mexico as a nation of drug violence as the rational for asylum claims. Finally, the Article appraises shifting paradigms: from Mexican-as-criminal (bad neighbor) to Mexican-as-economic (good neighbor) and considers whether this divergence promotes legal policies that serve to foster social inclusion.

The Article concludes by suggesting the need to re-examine the narratives in order to determine who benefits and who is harmed, and ultimately whether the narrative produces a usable framework to understand and resolve the political economic structures that produce violence in Mexico and improve the status of Mexicans in the United States.

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Originalism Grounded

Harold Anthony Lloyd, Wake Forest University School of Law, has published Plane Meaning and Thought: Real-World Semantics and Fictions of Originalism. Here is the abstract.

This article explores how meaning and thought work in the real-world of human experience. In doing so, it explores five basic planes or levels of such meaning and thought: references, issues, rules, applications of rules, and conclusions. It also explores framing, metaphor, and narrative in constructing such planes or levels of meaning and thought as well as some basic resulting forms of thought. Additionally, it examines original meaning as a cautionary negative example of how real-world meaning and thought do not and cannot work. Given the flexibility of framing involved in the multiple levels of real-world meaning and thought, originalism cannot sustain its claims of greater objectivity when compared to other interpretive approaches.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

A New Book From Ian Ward

Sex,Crime and Literature in Victorian England

Ian Ward

The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.

Ian Ward is Professor of Law at Newcastle University, and the author of a number of books on law, literature and history including 'Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives' (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 'Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination' (Cambridge University Press, 1999), ‘The English Constitution: Myths and Realities' (Hart Publishing, 2004), 'Law, Text, Terror' (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and most recently 'Law and the Brontes' (Palgrave, 2011).

 CONTENTS

Introduction: Dark Shapes 1

Angels in the House 4

At Home with the Dombeys 9

The Disease of Reading 16

Pleasing and Teaching 24

1 Criminal Conversations 29

One Person in Law 32

Newcome v Lord Highgate 38

Carlyle v Carlyle 46

Oh Reader! 51

2 Fashionable Crimes 58

The Sensational Moment 61

Fashionable Crimes 66

Mrs Mellish’s Marriages 73

The Shame of Miss Braddon 81

3 Unnatural Mothers 88

The Precious Quality of Truthfulness 90

Hardwicke’s Children 95

R v Sorrel 101

The Lost and the Saved 108

4 Fallen Angels 118

Walking the Streets 121

The Murder of Nancy Sikes 127

Contemplating Jenny 134

Because Men Made the Laws 142

Index 149

Hart Publishing (2014) (available in hardcover and various ebook formats)

Remembering the Emancipation Proclamation

Martha S. Jones, University of Michigan Law School, has published History and Commemoration: The Emancipation Proclamation at 150 at 3 Journal of the Civil War Era 452 (2013).

Marking the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation encourages debate about the past. January 1, 1863, does not stand out as a singular event, the commemoration of which silences the past. Instead, these articles capture some of the rich albeit messy past that was the Civil War and emancipation. Recovering that process, one that included congress members, generals, soldiers, sailors, and enslaved people, resituates the Emancipation Proclamation as history rather than myth. We learn how the proclamation was related to Congress’s emancipatory legislation and how its implementation relied on the resistance of formerly enslaved insurgents. The analysis of new sources, including visual culture, means that historical interpretation will continue to evolve. Transnational approaches suggest how the proclamation’s influence was far-reaching in the realms of law and state-building. And while the season of commemoration may draw to a close, historians history and commemoration will have many opportunities to collaborate on exhibitions and films, the sorts of spaces in which confrontations between history and fiction may find a productive tension. Commemoration need not rest on silence.

The full text is not available from SSRN. 

Storytelling For Lawyers, a new publication from Philip Meyer, Vermont Law School.

From the Oxford University Press website:

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Storytelling for Lawyers

Philip Meyer

• Good storytelling is a necessity for trial lawyers, and this book explains how to do it
• Author is a law professor who also holds a masters degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop
• Breaks narratives down into their fundamental parts to show how they work
• Will be of interest to any lawyer struggling to craft a compelling story

Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man, and Then What?

John M. Kang, St. Thomas University School of Law, has published Does Manly Courage Exist? in volume 13 of the Nevada Law Journal (2013). Here is the abstract. 

If you are a man, you probably have been subjected to it throughout your life, I would imagine. I am referring to the societal summons for you to fulfill the obligations of your gender: “step up like a man,” “act like a man,” and a precursor when you were very young, “big boys don’t cry.” Me, I am especially taken with the injunction these days to “man up.” More economical than its predecessors, the call to “man up” pithily encapsulates the idea of manliness.

For to be a man requires that you do something. Perhaps your dear mother adores you as the apple of her eye, but, trust me, no one else — including (or is it especially?) your wife — takes her cue from Billy Joel’s schmaltzy serenade and loves you just the way you are. (And who are you kidding? Not even your mom really feels that way.)
No. You, my poor bloke, are instead told to comply with the expectations of your community — "man up." What does manning up entail, though? While its meaning, like that of many aphorisms, is imprecise, the injunction to "man up" when distilled to its essence is meant to prompt a man to comport himself with valor.
But what is valor? And, by extension, what is manliness? Prepared for a Nevada Law Journal symposium, this brief essay, in the process of exploring both questions in the domains of law and culture, fails unabashedly to provide tangible answers for either but gleefully unpacks several more. 

Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Henry at Canossa

Frederick Mark Gedicks, Brigham Young University Law School, is publishing True Lies: Canossa as Myth in the San Diego Law Review. Here is the abstract.

This essay is a response to Paul Horwitz, “Freedom of the Church without Romance,” to be published as part of a symposium on “The Freedom of the Church.” The essay endorses Horwitz’s central thesis that advocates of a contemporary “freedom of the Church” have overlooked historical complexities in marking the 11th-century investiture conflict between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII, often referred to simply as "Canossa" after the small Emilian village where Henry sought absolution from Gregory, as the birth of that freedom.

The essay goes beyond Horwitz to argue that the historical account of “Canossa” presupposed by freedom-of-the-Church advocates is literally false. “Canossa,” instead, is a myth. More salient, nonmythical analogies for a “freedom of the Church” exist in U.S. constitutional history: genuine state sovereignty and dual-sovereignty federalism from the 19th century, and state dignity and native American domestic dependency from the contemporary era. These more historically accessible analogies all suggest that any “freedom of the Church” in U.S. constitutional doctrine is greatly diminished from the robust freedom argued for by those who invoke “Canossa” as that freedom’s defining moment.

But even the mythical “Canossa” remains important. Myths are stories that a society tells about itself, stories that preserve and clarify its deepest values and commitments. Like the “myth of Magna Carta” that has exerted so much influence on English and American constitutional law, “Canossa” emphasizes the dangers to liberty from a government that sees no bounds on its jurisdiction and authority. Though historically false, “Canossa” might yet be mythically true.

Download the full text of the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Narratives and Trials

Lisa Kern Griffin, Duke University School of Law, has published Narrative, Truth, & Trial, at 101 Georgetown Law Journal 281 (2012). Here is the abstract.

This article critically evaluates the relationship between constructing narratives and achieving factual accuracy at trials. The story model of adjudication — according to which jurors process testimony by organizing it into competing narratives — has gained wide acceptance in the descriptive work of social scientists and currency in the courtroom, but it has received little close attention from legal theorists. The article begins with a discussion of the meaning of narrative and its function at trial. It argues that the story model is incomplete, and that “legal truth” emerges from a hybrid of narrative and other means of inquiry. As a result, trials contain opportunities to promote more systematic consideration of evidence. Second, the article asserts that, to the extent the story model is descriptively correct with respect to the structure of juror decision making, it also gives rise to normative concerns about the tension between characteristic features of narrative and the truth-seeking aspirations of trial. Viewing trials through the lens of narrative theory brings sources of bias and error into focus and suggests reasons to increase the influence of analytic processes. The article then appraises improvements in trial mechanics — from prosecutorial discovery obligations through appellate review of evidentiary errors — that might account for the influence of stories. For example, a fuller understanding of narrative exposes the false assumption within limiting instructions that any piece of evidence exists in isolation. And to better inform how adjudicators respond to stories in the courtroom, the article argues for modifying instructions in terms of their candor, explanatory content, and timing.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.