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When The Truth And The Story Collide: What Legal Writers Can Learn From The Experience Of Non-Fiction Writers About The Limits Of Legal Storytelling, Jeanne M. Kaiser
When The Truth And The Story Collide: What Legal Writers Can Learn From The Experience Of Non-Fiction Writers About The Limits Of Legal Storytelling, Jeanne M. Kaiser
Faculty Scholarship
This Article examines what can be gained and what can be lost by using storytelling in legal writing. After reviewing some basic principles of legal storytelling, the Article reviews some lessons that can be learned from the experience of the New Journalists who adopted literary techniques in their non-fiction work. In the end, the Author concludes that while there is much value in using the tools of fiction in legal writing, it is only with a blend of narrative and analysis that we most successfully do our jobs as lawyers.
Statutory Interpretation In The Age Of Grammatical Permissiveness: An Object Lesson For Teaching Why Grammar Matters, Susan J. Hankin
Statutory Interpretation In The Age Of Grammatical Permissiveness: An Object Lesson For Teaching Why Grammar Matters, Susan J. Hankin
Faculty Scholarship
This article uses an unpublished case interpreting New York’s animal cruelty law as an object lesson to teach why grammar matters. In People v. Walsh, 2008 WL 724724 (N.Y. Crim. Ct. Jan. 3, 2008), the court’s interpretation of the statute turned, in part, on the serial comma rule (sometimes called the “Oxford comma” rule). The court followed a mandatory approach to interpret the statute’s meaning, even though most contemporary grammar and style books make such use of a comma optional. One of the many benefits of using a case example to teach why grammar matters is that it focuses students …
Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge
Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge
Faculty Scholarship
In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …