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Full-Text Articles in Rule of Law
Empathy, Legal Storytelling, And The Rule Of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?, Toni M. Massaro
Empathy, Legal Storytelling, And The Rule Of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?, Toni M. Massaro
Michigan Law Review
The legal storytelling theme that is the focus of this symposium is part of a larger, ongoing intellectual movement. American legal scholarship of the past several decades has revealed deep dissatisfaction with the abstract and collective focus of law and legal discourse. The rebellion against abstraction has, of late, been characterized by a "call to context." One strand of this complex body of thought argues that law should concern itself more with the concrete lives of persons affected by it. One key word in the dialogue is the term "empathy," which appears frequently in the work of critical legal studies, …
Legality And Empathy, Lynne N. Henderson
Legality And Empathy, Lynne N. Henderson
Michigan Law Review
This article rejects the assumption that legality - by which I mean the dominant belief system about the Rule and role of Law - and empathy are mutually exclusive concepts. Failure to recognize the phenomenon of empathy explicitly in legal decisions more generally may result from a fear of the emotional realm as irrational, rather than a rational. It may stem from a belief that the divide between "subject" and "object" is uncrossable. The resistance to empathy may be attributable to the adversarial ideology acquired during law school understanding the adversary is not important unless it serves one's instrumental …