Law 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 …

Probate Funding And The Litigation Funding Debate, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

Third-party funding of legal claims is becoming more common, and increasingly more controversial. Whether in the legislative arena or in the courts, the fight over whether and how independent parties might provide funding to litigants has become heated. The fight now threatens to spill over into the probate realm, where funders have begun purchasing probate rights from putative heirs. These probate funding transactions share many characteristics with broader litigation funding but also differ in important respects. The meager existing literature tends to address the issue in a pre-biased and methodologically unsound way, making it impossible to properly assess the nature …

Clarifying The “Probate Lending” Debate: A Response To Professors Horton And Chandrasekher, Jeremy Kidd

Articles

The debate over third-party funding of legal claims just got more interesting. The debate already had plot twists, such as free-market scholars lining up in opposition to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and alongside proplaintiff scholars who they oppose in tort reform debates. Now add to the mix a recent paper by Professors Horton and Chandrasekher that introduced an entirely new angle to the debate: funding of probate disputes. Now that this parallel area of funding has been identified, comparing and contrasting probate funding with litigation funding should illuminate the incentives that funders/recipients face in both scenarios. By pointing out …

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 …