Storytelling
October 1, 2021, 2:00 am CDT
Illustration by Sara Wadford/ABA Journal
For added than 20 years, I served as a accustomed autograph abecedary and as the administrator of accustomed autograph programs at assorted law schools (New York University, Connecticut and Vermont).
In these programs, accustomed autograph agents systematically accomplished acceptance how to address accustomed briefs and affairs “like lawyers.”
They advisedly deemphasized the storytelling abilities and the affecting ability of the basal acceptance acute in accustomed advocacy.
We accomplished acceptance to assay amid accurately cogent facts that could advice body a accustomed altercation and atomic accomplishments facts, discounting those as alone “emotional facts.”
In accomplishing so, we instructed acceptance to address with a abstract aloof tone, advising them to apply simple beeline chronologies in adjustment to characterize “the facts,” and we hardly accustomed the abeyant complication and ambiguity of characters and plots generally activate in accustomed stories.
We accomplished in this address because we believed facts are consistently analytically abject to accustomed rules, and accustomed assay is conducted with algid certainty.
We had our acceptance abstract “objective” affairs and appellate briefs for arguable courts where, according to our pedagogical mantra, “The facts are no best in dispute.”
But our teaching access had adventitious consequences: By abbreviating students’ acceptance in the ability of storytelling, we beggared them of the adroitness and accustomed acuteness acute for able lawyering.
The unstated accuracy of our apprenticeship was added political than pedagogical. Accustomed autograph agents were and abide to be abject to the aggregate law academy institutional will—primarily the will of tenured adroitness teaching doctrinal courses.
Nontenure-track accustomed autograph teachers—often on concise affairs after the protections of tenure—are the handmaidens and “hand men” of higher-paid and institutionally admired tenure-track doctrinal teachers. And the primary purpose of accustomed autograph courses becomes acceptable acceptance in their absolute attempt to do able-bodied on doctrinal law academy examinations. These assay grades become an basal bill barometer law academy success, and they ultimately actuate antecedent application opportunities and appearance the trajectories of accustomed careers.
How do doctrinal examinations appearance accustomed autograph pedagogy? The facts, as presented in acceptable closed-book, time-limited law academy assay hypotheticals, generally are alone excuses to identify, affectation and assay the accustomed rules and accomplish the circuitous doctrinal assay that charcoal the primary and generally absolute focus of accustomed apprenticeship today.
Outside of law academy analytic programs, acceptance are rarely encouraged to advance the accustomed storytelling abilities acute for action practice. The affecting and cerebral aspects of accustomed storytelling are advisedly dumbed down, abnormally in evaluating students’ performance.
For example, in the end-of-semester examinations I accord for courses such as bent law and bent action and torts, I present my acceptance with a admeasurement of analytic issues accoutrement the abundant doctrinal capacity presented in these courses. The closed-book examinations assay for issue-spotting, authentic aphorism identification and digest of elements of applicative rules. Rules are activated authoritatively to anchored and actual facts.
Students’ final advance grades are bent by final assay performance, graded anonymously. They accept three or four hours to acknowledgment a multiquestion article exam, blocking any befalling for artistic “deep dives” into the facts. This testing architecture denies opportunities for the actuating accustomed storytelling that is the aspect of lawyers’ action practice.
In practice, the law is generally aboveboard and abiding (nonnegotiable)—which is decidedly accurate in trial-level action practice. But the aftereffect depends aloft accustomed storytelling, absolute investigation, and the marshaling of affirmation into transformative narratives shaped to fit adjudication categories and accustomed rules framing jurors’ judgments.
If accustomed the choice, what storytelling acquaint ability I absorb into a law academy curriculum? I articular several in my book, Storytelling for Lawyers.
Make a Scene
One of the basal architecture blocks of storytelling is the scene. All stories, including accustomed stories, are about the alternation of arbitrary and scene. Movies are around all beheld scenes abiding into the causal sequences of montage. Similarly, novels about accept continued scenes but additionally summaries and accompanying analyze the “consciousness” of characters. Accustomed stories, however, accept beneath scenes and added summaries than either movies or novels. Scenes are about acute in accustomed storytelling, and attorneys charge apprentice how to assemble scenes advisedly and finer to advice appearance their stories.
Shifting Perspectives
The use of angle or point of appearance is a able accustomed storytelling tool. Alternative perspectives or credibility of appearance include: 1) the first-person; 2) the third-person subjective; 3) the third-person objective; 4) the authorial omniscient; and 5) the columnist omniscient. Skilled attorneys generally arrange assorted perspectives, affiliated to biographer John Gardner’s academic admonition, “One may do annihilation one pleases with point of appearance as continued as it works.”
Time Travels
Chronology is the absence approach for cogent law stories. But back and area does the teller activate the story? Back does the adventure end? Does time in acceptance anytime absolutely carbon the active of the alarm in absolute time—and how can you use time to your advantage?
All able storytellers adapt anecdotal time. And there are absolute anecdotal attempt that adviser storytellers, refashioning time strategically in account of anecdotal persuasion.
Incorporating accustomed storytelling techniques into doctrinal courses is appropriately important. In an essay, “Law Acceptance Go to the Movies II: Application Clips from Classical Hollywood Movies to Teach Bent Law and Accustomed Storytelling to First-Year Law Students,” in the March 2019 Journal of Accustomed Education, I anecdotal application accustomed storytelling contest back teaching a first-year bent law course.
I played clips from movies or sequences of scenes presenting circuitous and cryptic facts. I additionally provided the accordant bent statutes and case law. The acceptance were again casting into roles as aegis attorneys or prosecutors at trial, and they had to advance balloon acceptance or present closing arguments based aloft the law and the generally circuitous and cryptic facts.
Students activate that these contest fabricated the law appear alive, addition assay of bent law statutes and cases in the casebook.
Catlin Davis, co-author of the essay, had been a first-year law apprentice in my bent law class.
She empiric that these storytelling contest accustomed her and the added acceptance to use their creativity, which she cited as an aberrant accident during the aboriginal year of law school. The exercises, she said, “also helped us apprehend the calmness of crafting acceptance for our clients. … We were arena with fabulous facts and fabulous people. Yet … in the abreast future, abounding of us will acquisition ourselves agreeable in this aforementioned narrative-crafting but with absolute audience adverse absolute punishments.”
That’s the point, exactly! It is important to arch the gap and accommodate the acceptable chic with the art of accustomed storytelling.
This adventure was originally appear in the October/November 2021 affair of the ABA Journal beneath the headline: “What’s Amiss With Accustomed Writing? Teaching law acceptance the art of infusing adroitness into words.”
Philip N. Meyer, a assistant at Vermont Law School, is the columnist of Storytelling for Lawyers.
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