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Nonprofits And Narrative: Piers Plowman, Anthony Trollope, And Charities Law, Jill R. Horwitz

Articles

What are the narrative possibilities for understanding nonprofit law? Given the porous barriers between nonprofit law and the literature about it, there are many. Here I consider two. First, nonprofit law and nonprofit literature are each enriched and made fully explicable by reference to the other. Nonprofit law has grown in parallel with literature. It may even be that important legal texts, texts about doing and being good, were imported directly from literary sources into law. Second, in writings ranging from sensational journalism to high literature, nonprofit laws and the scandals involving their violations have captured the public imagination for …

The Perils Of Courtroom Stories, Stephan Landsman

Michigan Law Review

As Janet Malcolm1 tells it, Sheila McGough was a middle-aged single woman living at home with her parents and working as an editor and administrator in the publications department of the Carnegie Institute when she decided to switch careers and go to law school. She applied and was admitted to the then recently accredited law school at George Mason University. After graduation, she began a solo practice in northern Virginia that involved a significant amount of stateappointed criminal defense work. In 1986, approximately four years after her graduation from law school, McGough received a call requesting assistance from an incarcerated …

Legal Narratives, Theraputic Narratives: The Invisibility And Omnipresence Of Race And Gender, Leslie G. Espinoza

Michigan Law Review

My first introduction to Denise Gray was through a form. The intake sheet was dated October 17, 1994. The legal problem was straightforward. My introduction to Denise Gray would come much later. I am a clinical law professor. The clinic, Boston College Legal Assistance Bureau, is known as "LAB." I teach students law by supervising them as they represent, usually for the first time, a real person with real problems.

West On Story And Theory, L. H. Larue

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Narrative, Authority, and Law by Robin West

Storytelling For Oppositionists And Others: A Plea For Narrative, Richard Delgado

Michigan Law Review

This essay examines the use of stories in the struggle for racial reform. Part I shows how we construct social reality by devising and passing on stories - interpretive structures by which we impose order on experience and it on us. To illustrate how stories structure reality, I choose a single race-tinged event and tell it in the form of five stories or narratives. Each account is followed by analysis, showing what the story includes and leaves out and how it perpetuates one version of social reality rather than another. Part II deals with counterstories, competing versions that can be …

The Cognitive Dimension Of The Agon Between Legal Power And Narrative Meaning, Steven L. Winter

Michigan Law Review

In Part II, I first provide a brief description of what we are learning about the grounded and imaginative nature of the cognitive process. I then elaborate the cognitive structure of the concept narrative and consider the manner in which we employ that concept in recognizing, understanding, and constructing narratives of all types - from folktales like the midrash to avant-garde literature like Waiting for Godot. In Part III, I employ this information about the cognitive and narrative processes to explore the secondary role of narrative in the institutionalization of legal and social meaning. I will identify the cognitive …

Foreword: Telling Stories, Kim Lane Schepple

Michigan Law Review

Why is there such a rush to storytelling? Why has narrative become such an important and recurring theme in legal scholarship these days?

This issue testifies to the attractiveness of, and limits to, storytelling as a force in law. But whose stories are told? Who listens? And who responds? This symposium explores these questions, challenging traditional practices and exploring new ones in the telling of stories in the law. One important lesson that can be learned from this issue is that narrative is a way of organizing, coping with, even acting on the world. Stories carry power because they have …

A Tale Of Two Clients: Thinking About Law As Language, Clark D. Cunningham

Michigan Law Review

This is a true story. It is actually three true stories. The article taken as a whole tells a story of my personal search for a new way of talking about the experience of being a lawyer, a quest which is leading me to think more and more about law as a kind of language and lawyering as a form of translation. Rather like a medieval romance, embedded within this story of a quest are two tales, about clients I have represented in the course of my clinical teaching.

As much as possible, both levels of narrative are presented in …

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, …

Difference Made Legal: The Court And Dr. King, David Luban

Michigan Law Review

My aim in this essay is to contrast two legal retellings of the same event: a set of demonstrations sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that led to the arrest and incarceration of Martin Luther King, Jr. One is the Supreme Court majority opinion in Walker v. City of Birmingham, sustaining King's conviction; the other, King's own defense of his actions in his Letter from Birmingham Jail I wish to show how the self-same event entails radically different legal consequences when it appears in different narratives, one the Supreme Court's official voice, the …