Critical Race Theory, the ideology of victimization,

[Fred Gedicks]

My post in response to Michael's first message did not go through for
some reason; I think it's still relevant, since in my view stories
have a legitimate place in legal scholarship, and not just in jury
trials:

Yikes!!  A whole genre of legal scholarship disappeared while I ate
lunch.

Stories are useful rhetorical devices even (especially?) for lawyers.
They can powerfully illustrate arguments, and at the least explain why
different people come at issues differently.  They must, of course, be
at least literally true--that is, after all, what makes them powerful,
that they recount what happened to a real person--and it is certainly
fair to criticize the excesses of narrative scholarship and critical
_____ theory, which too often take the telling of a story to have
established an epistemological position.  But I did not take either
Sandy or Jack to be arguing that storytellers belong only in English
departments.  But cf. Carrington, Of Law and the River.

Fred Gedicks
BYU Law School
gedicksf at lawgate.byu.edu



>>> Michael MASINTER <masinter at NSU.ACAST.NOVA.EDU> 08/06 2:35 PM >>>
Of course good lawyers are storytellers; a trial is a dramatic and
moving
story.  My comment, along with the far more developed critique of
Suzanna
Sherry, goes to their use as scholarship.


Michael R. Masinter                     3305 College Avenue
Nova Southeastern University            Fort Lauderdale, Fl. 33314
Shepard Broad Law Center                (954) 262-6151
masinter at law.acast.nova.edu

On Wed, 6 Aug 1997, Sanford Levinson wrote:

> Fred Gedicks writes:
>
> I did not take either
> >Sandy or Jack to be arguing that storytellers belong only in
English
> >departments.  But cf. Carrington, Of Law and the River.
> >
> He is certainly right as far as I am concerned.  Indeed, I don't
think you
> can practice law without constantly telling stories that make the
listener
> want to do something for the poor plaintiff (or protect the unfairly
accused
> defendant), and so on.  The question is how much one should
generalize from
> any given story, and the answer, I think, is not very much.  As
Ronald
> Reagan might put it, trust but verify not only that the purported
episode
> actually happened (as with our young friend Timmy), but also that
the
> episode really *is* the tip of an iceberg rather than a genuinely
isolated
> event.
>
> Sandy
>