Episode 112: Quasi-Narrative

Is legal writing narrative? How about judgments, appeals, testimony? We talk with Simon Stern about narrative and its techniques and effects, suspense, dicta, authorial purposes, a crazy idea for a novel, mathematical proofs, and more.

This show’s links:

Simon Stern’s faculty profile and writing

Simon Stern, Narrative in the Legal Text: Judicial Opinions and Their Narratives

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II: Of the Rights of Thing (Simon Stern, ed.); Simon’s introduction to the volume

William Brewer and Edward Lichtenstein, Event Schemas, Story Schemas, and Story Grammars

About the Paradox of Suspense

Jonathan D. Leavitt et al., Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories; Jonathan D. Leavitt et al., The Fluency of Spoilers: Why Giving Away Endings Improves Stories

Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative (Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur, eds.) (Introduction to the book)

Mitchel Lasser, The European Pasteurization of French Law

Owen Barfield, This Ever Diverse Pair

Wikipedia on epistolary novels

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members

Oral Argument 48: Legal Truth (guest Lisa Kern Griffin)

Special Guest: Simon Stern.