Essay: The Moral of the Story - The Power of Narrative to Inspire and Sustain Scholarship

Abstract

This essay describes the power of story as a tool to inspire scholarship. We think of stories as a means to bring life to legal cases in a way that grounds them and makes them visceral and comprehensible. We use storytelling to teach our students – showing how the emotive power of a story can persuade. However, stories can also serve a different function. In my search for a way to inspire my own writing, I discovered that a good story could be the source of a writer’s motivation to both create and sustain scholarship.

Basing scholarship on a story essentially mimics the process that has been occurring all along in the formation of the common law. The common law develops and changes as new stories push the limits of existing rules. Thus, stories are the most natural and logical fodder for scholarship about current trends and doctrines. This essay describes how one young man’s story exemplified and illustrated a problem in the way laws have changed to include younger offenders in the adult criminal system.