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Law's Stories
"Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law": it has become evident that topics traditionally
studied by literary scholars and critics have taken a place in legal studies. Rhetoric,
the art of persuasion and, by extension, the organization of discourse, is a property
of all statements. Narrative appears to be one of our large, all-pervasive ways of
organizing and speaking the world—the way we make sense of meanings that
unfold in and through time. The law, focused on putting facts in the world into
coherent form and presenting them persuasively—to make a "case"—must always
be intimately intertwined with rhetoric and narrative. Yet only recently have the
implications of law's dependence on narrative and rhetoric become an object of
intense investigation and interrogation. Many lawyers, judges, and legal scholars
would no doubt acknowledge the presence of rhetoric and narrative in their disci-
plines but then ask, So what? What follows? Does it follow that legal studies should
let themselves be invaded by the concerns of literary criticism? And if so, how?
It is no secret that "law and literature" has become something of a movement, a
subject addressed in scholarly journals and even an occasional law school course.
But the rubric covers different uses of that "and." For some, and perhaps most
obviously, the "and" means law in literature: study of representations of the law in
literature, law as a recurrent and important literary theme. This is not a negligible
topic, since literature, from Aeschylus to Kafka, keeps encountering the law as that
14
16 Peter Brooks
18 Peier Brooks
20 Peter Brooks
At the end of the symposium, I felt that we were ready to begin. By this I mean
that in the manner of successful conferences—and this one was marked by an
exceptionally high level of thinking, storytelling, and rhetoric—"Narrative and
Rhetoric in the Law" had begun to clear the terrain, define the issues, provide the
terms for a more sustained consideration of the questions raised. One would have
liked to be able to shut all the participants in a room and make them work through to
further definition and clarification. Still, what had emerged clearly enough by the
end of the sessions was not only that the law is consubstantial with narrative far
more than is usually acknowledged but that the law turns on what we might call
narrative in situation: stories in their dynamic transaction between tellers and
listeners. How stories are told, listened to, received, interpreted—how they are
made operative, enacted—these are issues by no means marginal to the law nor
exclusive to theory; rather, they are part of law's daily living reality. If the essays
and comments in this book succeed in making this point—as I believe they do—
they open the way to continuing research that would make imperative the closer
cooperation of legal and literary analysts. Here, I think, we find a shock of recogni-
tion as two disciplines with disparate aims discover that they have important matter
of common concern and that transgressing the boundaries that separate them has a
real logic, indeed a certain necessity.
22 Peter Brooks