Litigation Commons^™

Unbelievable: How Narrative Can Help Vulnerable Narrators Overcome Perceived Unreliability In The Legal System, Cathren Page

Articles

This article examines how advocates can champion vulnerable narrators’ truths. First, advocates must prime the audience by educating the audience about the ways the vulnerability manifests; this process helps to allay credibility questions. Second, advocates must reframe seemingly untrustworthy behavior by showing how the behavior is consistent with someone in the vulnerable narrator’s situation. Third, advocates must create what fiction writers call verisimilitude—a sense of reality—by including concrete details that logically fit together in the legal narrative. Finally, advocates must label the tactics commonly used to discredit vulnerable narrators so that the audience can see those tactics for what they …

Like A Glass Slipper On A Stepsister: How The One Ring Rules Them All At Trial, Cathren Page

Articles

Trial attorneys can learn techniques that fiction writers have been using successfully for centuries and endow a single object to “rule them all.” In fact, there is a growing field of legal scholarship, known as Applied Legal Storytelling, which involves applying story telling concepts to legal concepts, and some evidence suggests that juries are responsive to narrative framework. Thus trial attorneys can use the literary concept of endowed objects to identify a key piece of physical evidence that weaves a thread of narrative continuity through the case and resonates in the mind of the judge or juror. ...

Endowed objects …