![]() Many advocates of storytelling explicitly contrast rational argument and the more directly emotive power of stories. Consider the following very useful summary paragraph by two thoughtful and sympathetic critics. This nicely captures my portrayal of the trial between Tony and Corey, and we will use IBE and legal narrative as a way of looking at a couple more murder trials directly.Īs much as I admire the storytelling movement in the law, many of its most strident champions endorse a view of legal narrative that I find deeply problematic. The probability-based accounts, rather than being an alternative, are parasitic on the more fundamental explanation-based considerations.4 The process of inference to the best explanation itself best explains both the macro-structure of proof at trial and the microlevel issues regarding the value of particular items of evidence. The goal of storytelling in law is to persuade an official decision maker that one’s story is true, to win the case, and thus invoke the coercive force of the state on one’s behalf.3Īnd many academic lawyers explicitly endorse IBE as the internal logic of the arguments that lawyers produce at trial. One view of legal storytelling sees it candidly as a method for presenting an argument. As you might have guessed, I believe that inference to the best explanation (IBE) forms the foundation of such a legal logic. A surprising humanistic partnership of philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science, as well as literary theory, particularly narratology, offers a promising outline of just such a logic of legal reasoning. What is needed is something like a logic of legal reasoning. And sadly, not all legal reasoning counts as good legal reasoning. And academic lawyers, and a host of other legal scholars, reason. Trial lawyers reason, as do their audiences-juries. But as Carter certainly knows, appellate court judges are not the only legal reasoners. Certainly, understanding how to unpack and evaluate appellate court opinions is an import legal skill and deserving of careful scholarly attention (we did a bit of this in analyzing Justice Blackmun’s understanding of the death penalty and the Constitution). This definition of legal reasoning seems overly narrow. In a nutshell, legal reasoning describes how effectively an opinion’s blend of case facts, prior law, social background facts, and moral values create a legal outcome that makes some plausible sense of the moral and empirical world we know.2 ![]() ![]() Consider, for example, the definition of legal reasoning put forward by Lief Carter: Legal academics spend a good deal of time analyzing these concepts in the very specific context of the law. We have been concerned with notions of good reasoning and good evidence. ![]() I am much taken these days with a trend in legal scholarship that I believe has direct relevance to the themes we are developing in this book. ![]()
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