A Narratology of the Law? Narratives in Legal Discourse

Abstract

Part II of this paper summarizes narratological approaches to the narrativity of the law. Two proposals are given extensive attention: Peter Brooks’s proposals regarding the important influence of narrative on legal decision-making, and Meir Sternberg’s analyses of the law code as narrative text. Part III, in contrast with part II, analyzes more recent examples of the genre of the law code as well as a judgment. In this section the argument consists in countering exaggerated claims for the narrativity of the law by demonstrating how narrative substrates are carefully elided in the prose of legal discourse.