Creating Legal Worlds
Story and Style in a Culture of Argument
Published on 6. September 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
190 pages
978-1-4875-2380-0 (ISBN)
Description
A legal judgment is first and foremost a story, a narrative of facts about the parties to the case. Creating Legal Worlds is a study of how that narrative operates, and how rhetoric, story, and style function as integral elements of any legal argument.
Through careful analyses of notable cases from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greig Henderson analyses how the rhetoric of storytelling often carries as much argumentative weight within a judgement as the logic of legal distinctions. Through their narrative choices, Henderson argues, judges create a normative universe - the world of right and wrong within which they make their judgements - and fashion their own judicial self-images. Drawing on the work of the law and literature movement, Creating Legal Worlds is a convincing argument for paying close attention to the role of story and style in the creation of judicial decisions.
Through careful analyses of notable cases from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greig Henderson analyses how the rhetoric of storytelling often carries as much argumentative weight within a judgement as the logic of legal distinctions. Through their narrative choices, Henderson argues, judges create a normative universe - the world of right and wrong within which they make their judgements - and fashion their own judicial self-images. Drawing on the work of the law and literature movement, Creating Legal Worlds is a convincing argument for paying close attention to the role of story and style in the creation of judicial decisions.
Reviews / Votes
'Creating Legal Worlds provides valuable insights into the role narrative takes in judgement writing... this book provides a reminder that the best story does not always match the law.'- Allison Graham (Saskatchewan Law Review vol 79:2016) 'Creating Legal Worlds provides valuable insight into the role narrative takes in judgement writing... Litigators will receive insight as to how to frame their arguments but this book provides a reminder that the best story does not always match the law.'
- Allison Graham (Saskatchewan Law Review vol 79:2016) 'I recommend Henderson's book to legal historians as a salutary perspective-shift in which they will find much that is new and much that is "familiar, yet somehow strange" - and worth thinking about.'
- Angela Fernandez (Jotwell: The Journal of Things we Like (LOTS) March2016) 'This intriguing book provides an important understanding of legal writing-whether on the part of lawyers, judges, or police officers who are writing reports-and how to conceptualize and analyze it.'
- G.C. David (Choice Magazine vol 53:07:2016)
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Toronto
Canada
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
290 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4875-2380-0 (9781487523800)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Greig Henderson is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Toronto.
Content
Introduction
1. The Cost of Persuasion: Figure, Story, and Eloquence in the Rhetoric of Judicial Discourse
2. Pure and Impure Styles: Formalism and Pragmatism in the Language of Decision Writing
3. The Perils of Analogy: Legal World-Making and Judicial Self Fashioning in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad
4. Murder, They Wrote: The Rhetoric of Causation in the Language of the Law
5. Narrative Theory and the Art of Judgment: The Anatomy of a Supreme Court Decision
6. The Look in his Eyes: Rusk v. State, State v. Rusk
7. Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Law
Postscript: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and Scepticism
1. The Cost of Persuasion: Figure, Story, and Eloquence in the Rhetoric of Judicial Discourse
2. Pure and Impure Styles: Formalism and Pragmatism in the Language of Decision Writing
3. The Perils of Analogy: Legal World-Making and Judicial Self Fashioning in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad
4. Murder, They Wrote: The Rhetoric of Causation in the Language of the Law
5. Narrative Theory and the Art of Judgment: The Anatomy of a Supreme Court Decision
6. The Look in his Eyes: Rusk v. State, State v. Rusk
7. Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Law
Postscript: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and Scepticism