Narratives of Enlightenment 101

through written statement and argument. Accordingly, these writers posit that legal texts might usefully be studied with techniques drawn from the field of“literature”: methods to literary criticism, theories of hermeneutics and rhetoric, and the like.” Law and Literature is thus a significant departure from the standard approaches to legal study that have concentrated upon doctrinal analysis, that is, the substance of law as opposed to its form of expression. It is also as a protest against some newer models of jurisprudence, which tend(as Professor Katz does in this case) to look through or past the language of legal discourse in search of the“real” economic and political motivations of law and legal decision. Law and Literature insists rather that legal language is the core of the activity called law and therefore deserves to be studied in its own right; the literary approach conceives of law“not as rules and policies but as stories, explanations, performances, linguistic exchanges.”

The word“stories” evokes one of the central themes of Law and Literature scholarship: the ubiquity of narrative in law.” It is obvious to even the casual observer that much of“law” consists of the telling of stories. The client presents a story to her lawyer, who transforms it into a legal narrative, that is, a form of the story that will be accepted by judges and other legal actors as a possible basis of action. The judge before whom the case is tried will then write a narrative of her own that either accepts the story as presented by the lawyer or adjusts it in accordance with the competing narrative of the opposing litigant.”> Recent scholarship, however, has suggested a deeper role for narrative in the legal experience.” I am referring to theories of“narratology” or“the narrative construction of reality,” that is, the perception that human beings make their normative world through the creation and telling of stories. In this view, we organize the raw data of our experience by drawing associations of cause and effect, by making assumptions of what is likely to occur if we do this or that, We claim meaning for these data by organizing them into Patterns of story;“(i)n narrative, we take experience and configure it