Law Commons^™

A Shift To Narrativity, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

Slipshod, inconsistent use of core Applied Legal Storytelling terminology muddles its discourse and hampers its growth. Refining the field’s vocabulary is essential, but insufficient, as exclusive focus on the field’s objects of inquiry, such as story and narrative, and the means of creating or conveying them, such as storytelling and narrating, risks losing the “A” in ALS. We need a new focus, one unburdened by the ambiguities and negative associations of existing options that more accurately reflects Applied Legal Storytelling scholars’ unique contributions. A shift to narrativity. Narrativity, as imagined here, is a top-level quality of a legal text or …

Telling Through Type: Typography And Narrative In Legal Briefs, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

Most legal authors today self-publish, using basic word-processing software and letting the software’s default settings determine what their documents will look like when printed. As these settings are not optimized for legal texts, they do so at their peril. The default font Times New Roman, for example, as Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook warns, is "utterly inappropriate for long documents [such as] briefs."

Commentators have started urging a more deliberate approach to legal typography. Their suggestions, however, have been content-neutral, intended for all legal texts and focused on goals such as legibility and readability.

Typography, however, has much greater potential. The …