Storytelling Across the Curriculum

Carolyn Grose, William Mitchell College of Law, has published Storytelling Across the Curriculum: From Margin to Center, from Clinic to the Classroom, in volume 7 of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (2010). Here is the abstract.

Narrative theory and storytelling can be used throughout the law school curriculum, cutting across types of courses and types of lawyering. I teach skills, doctrinal, and clinical courses, and I use narrative theory and storytelling in all three, always with the same goal: to help students recognize that as lawyers, they are not only hearers and tellers of stories, but also, and perhaps most important, constructors of stories.

I use the term “narrative theory” to describe the study of story construction, which is different from - though clearly related to - story telling. Construction is the act of building: putting together the elements that comprise the story and then writing it down. Performance of the story - reading it, telling it, enacting it - comes later.

In this piece, I develop the idea of using storytelling across the curriculum to teach students critical thinking and reflection about their role as lawyers. In Part One, I describe the importance of storytelling and stories in the craft of lawyering. Part Two describes my own teaching in the context of narrative theory and practice, and it analyzes how and why this context achieves the goal of developing students’ critical thinking skills and reflective practice. The piece concludes with the suggestion that narrative theory and storytelling as a pedagogy used systematically across individual courses and the curriculum has the potential to transform a student’s experience of law school, resulting in her development as an empowered, reflective, and socially responsible member of the legal profession, regardless of the kind of law she practices or the kinds of clients she represents.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Uses of Shakespeare in the Law Curriculum

Allen Mendenhall, West Virginia University, Temple University, and Furman University, has published Shakespeare's Place in Law-and-Literature. Here is the abstract.

Nearly every Anglo-American law school offers a course called Law-and-Literature. Nearly all of these courses assign one or more readings from Shakespeare’s oeuvre. Why study Shakespeare in law school? That is the question at the heart of these courses. Some law professors answer the question in terms of cultivating moral sensitivity, fine-tuning close-reading skills, or practicing interpretive strategies on literary rather than legal texts. Most of these professors insist on an illuminating nexus between two supposedly autonomous disciplines. The history of how Shakespeare became part of the legal canon is more complicated than these often defensive, syllabus-justifying declarations allow. This article examines the history of Shakespeare studies vis-à-vis legal education. It begins with early law-and-literature scholarship, which focused on Shakespeare’s history or biography – speculating as it did about whether Shakespeare was a lawyer or perchance received legal training – and concludes with recent law-and-literature scholarship treating Shakespeare as a source of insight for law students and lawyers alike. I submit that early law-and-literature scholarship on Shakespeare anticipated New Historicist theory and that more recent law-and-literature work, with its turn to presentism, is in lockstep with Shakespeare studies. In law-and-literature classrooms, Shakespeare is more fashionable like a hobby than scholarly like a profession; but law-and-literature scholarship on Shakespeare amounts to high-caliber work based on interdisciplinary research as well as deep engagement with legal and literary texts.

I wrap up this essay with a note about the direction of the university in general and of the law-and-literature movement in particular. I admit that my closing argument, as it were, is tendentious. It raises issues usually raised by confrontational academics and suggests remedies for what William M. Chace has called “the decline of the English Department” or what Harold Bloom has called “Groupthink” in “our obsolete academic institutions, whose long suicide since 1967 continues”. If Chace and Bloom are right about a decline in academic standards – evidence shows that they are at least right about a decline in numbers of English majors – then the fate of literary studies seems grim. Nevertheless, Chace and Bloom overlook the migration of literature professors into American law schools, a phenomenon yet to receive critical attention. Another aspect of this phenomenon is the migration of students from the humanities to professional schools. I personally have known many students who wished to go on to graduate school in the humanities but quite understandably viewed that route as impractical and went to law school instead. A positive result of this trend is that a substantial body of law students is open to the idea of law-and-literature and finds luminaries like George Anastaplo or Stanley Fish more interesting than other law professors. My final comments address the strange exodus of literary scholars into professional schools, which pay more money and arguably provide vaster audiences and readership, more generous funding opportunities, and reduced teaching loads. Perhaps more than other literary disciplines, save for cultural studies, Shakespeare studies has moved into the realm of interdisciplinarity, albeit without large contributions from scholars outside of literature departments. The law-and-literature field would have perished without the expertise of literature professors; likewise, Shakespeare studies, if it continues down the path of politics and cultural criticism, will perish without the expertise of economists, political scientists, and legal scholars, whose mostly non-Marxist perspectives, when pooled with the perspectives of literature professors, might fill out a space for interesting scholarship and redeem the interdisciplinary label. Information-sharing is especially crucial for literature scholars who, in order to examine the history of Shakespeare in American culture, have turned to practices and methods traditionally reserved for other disciplines.

Full text not currently available on SSRN.

The Alternative Cultural Narrative and Legal Education

Brennan P. Breeland has published I Am Jack's Radical Self-Degradation: A Pedagogical Argument for the Inclusion of the Indigenous Narrative in the Postmodern Legal Education. Here is the abstract.

An American legal education begins with a first-year curriculum which is largely uniform across the spectrum of institutions: Contracts, Torts, Constitutional Law, Property, Civil Procedure, and the like are considered the requisite basis for the continued study of law. In the course of learning the basic precepts underpinning these areas of law, first-year law students are exposed not only to the majority rules and those which govern the jurisdictions which contain the law school itself, but also minority rules and important lines of alternative reasoning, because incorporating these alternative analyses is critical to providing future practitioners of the law the proper tools with which to practice. It goes without saying that the value gained from exposure to the minority rules is not insignificant, but this is not the end of the discussion of legal pedagogy and the best way to educate legal thinkers.

In analyzing legal pedagogy, it is important to determine not only the quality of the instruction, but what it is that is being taught. Of equal importance is the converse – an analysis of what is not being taught. The typical legal education does not usually incorporate an understanding of the nature of the law as a narrative, and further, it reinforces the silencing of alternative cultural narratives, or story-based understandings of legal concepts, in favor of the “color-blind” jurisprudence and pedagogy that is only color-blind in that it only sees white (i.e., non-colored) western narratives as viable. This article explores the value of incorporating native narratives into the traditional legal education, in a manner similar to the study of the common law of other jurisdictions for the purpose of learning basic concepts of law.

The article proposes the inclusion of the indigenous narrative in the baseline legal education by including cases from tribal courts in the case method of legal study, and considers this proposal through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, specifically as illustrated by David Fincher’s film adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Legal Practice and Education in Edinburgh in the Early Twentieth Century

Hector Lewis MacQueen, University of Edinburgh School of Law, has published Lawyers' Edinburgh 1908-2008, at 8 Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (new series) 27 (2010). Here is the abstract.

This paper considers the physical setting of legal practice and education in Edinburgh in 1908 and compares it to the position in 2008. It is a contribution to the centenary celebrations of the Old Edinburgh Club in 2008.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Teaching Storytelling In Law Schools

Nancy B. Rapoport, William S. Boyd School of Law (UNLV), has published "Where Have All the (Legal) Stories Gone?" at M/E Insights 7 (Fall 2009). Here is the abstract.

This essay examines whether law schools are doing a good job of teaching the art of storytelling to law students.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Call For Papers

CALL FOR ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS

CRN No. 9 (Gender and Legal Education)

LAW AND SOCIETY ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING



May 28-31, 2009

Denver, CO


DEADLINE FOR PROPOSAL: FEBRUARY 25, 2009





Roundtable: Teaching Gender Inequality in Law Schools



Conversations about gender and sexuality in core law school courses are often focused on equality—constitutional doctrines of formal equality meted out by high courts – rather than underlying causes, effects and forms of inequality. Law students are rarely asked to consider if inequality itself is undesirable, and whether law has a role in perpetuating, creating, resisting or eliminating it. While these concepts are foundational in most sociology or anthropology programs, they are not central to the law school curriculum, especially in the first year.

While there is no doubt that court cases eliminating legal barriers to gender and sexual equality are important for all law students to learn, the conversation is impoverished if they are the only vehicle used to examine gender, sexuality and other intersecting forms of inequality in a typical course of law school study. Teachers of today’s generation of students also must grapple with the fact that gender inequality looks different to students than it did even fifteen years ago. The generation of women entering law school—the beneficiaries of equal opportunity to education under Title IX and employment under Title VII – are members of a community in which young women have excelled. Many of them do not perceive gendered inequality operating in their lives. This creates a displacement where students who are interested in women’s rights are more comfortable examining the inequality of women in exotic foreign locales (such as inequalities suffered by Muslim women, victims of sex trafficking or of mass sexual violence). At the same time, however, they are slow to recognize the structural nature of gendered inequalities that persist closer to home. They may be quick to dismiss their own anxieties as problems that can be overcome by making perfect individual choices. Students interested in eliminating the inequality of the LGBTQ community might perceive that inequality more starkly, but still often lack the vocabulary to discuss questions of law, power and sexuality outside of the bounds of formal equality.

In the climate of change created by recent critiques of legal education, roundtable participants will take up the question of how social scientists and law teachers can become allies in the creation of materials, techniques and strategies to teach law students about the gender, sexual, and intersectional inequalities in the U.S. legal system and culture. Possible topics might include: innovations in legal pedagogy; strategies for exploring gender and sexual inequality in core law school courses (e.g., contracts, torts, criminal law); whether the training of lawyers should include an apprenticeship of identity and purpose that has at its core a commitment to reducing inequality; teaching techniques for reinvigorating courses on discrimination with more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of how structural inequalities play out in the lives of lawyers and their clients; exploring the role of experiential and clinical education in both fighting inequality and teaching students about its nature; incorporating questions of how law enables corporations and consumer culture to create and perpetuate gender inequality into law school teaching; and addressing inequality created or sustained by culture and religion in U.S. domestic as well as international settings.



If you would like to join the roundtable, please email Daniela Kraiem, CRN No. 9 Organizer and Associate Director, Women and the Law Program, American University Washington College of Law at kraiem@wcl.american.edu with a brief paragraph describing your interest in participating in the roundtable by February 25, 2009.



LSA roundtables are generally informal discussions, guided by the questions and themes raised by the panelists. Panelists should be prepared to offer 7-10 minutes of remarks, followed by discussion of roundtable themes. If you are already on two panels at the LSA, I can’t add you as a formal participant, but would love to have you join us as an active member of the roundtable.