Resistance to Stories

Abstract

This Article examines the sometimes-vehement resistance to legal storytelling, a resistance reflected in Daniel Farber and Suzanna Sherry’s oft-cited article, Telling Stories Out of School: An Essay on Legal Narrative. Part I suggests that, rather than focusing on who is telling stories in law, it is more important to ask why. The answer, put simply, is that stories are said to demonstrate how power can inhere invisibly in the most apparently neutral of standards. The focus on power helps explain why story-telling holds strong appeal for scholars especially interested in social change. Storytelling attempts to illustrate the inevitable partiality of all evaluative criteria, and this attempt suggests a counter-critique of Farber and Sherry’s appraisal. For the kinds of standards to which Farber and Sherry would hold storytellers — standards requiring “reason” and “analysis” — are exactly those the storytellers wish to question.

Part II explores a dilemma within the storytelling movement. Many of the stories told in law recount in detail real-life experiences, experiences which the law can respect or deny. Yet storytellers often argue that there is no reality that can be uncontroversially known, i.e., that there are no “true” accounts, just many accounts. The article argues that it is this inconsistent, ambivalent attitude toward the truth-claims of stories that opens the movement up to criticism.

Keywords: storytelling, narrative, legal scholarship, critical race theory, stock stories, neutrality, objectivity, practical reason