Description
Book SynopsisThrough careful analyses of notable cases from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Greig Henderson analyses how the rhetoric of storytelling often carries as much argumentative weight within a judgement as the logic of legal distinctions.
Trade Review‘Creating Legal Worlds provides valuable insights into the role narrative takes in judgement writing… this book provides a reminder that the best story does not always match the law.’ -- Allison Graham * Saskatchewan Law Review vol 79:2016 *
‘Creating Legal Worlds provides valuable insight into the role narrative takes in judgement writing… Litigators will receive insight as to how to frame their arguments but this book provides a reminder that the best story does not always match the law.’ -- Allison Graham * Saskatchewan Law Review vol 79:2016 *
‘I recommend Henderson’s book to legal historians as a salutary perspective-shift in which they will find much that is new and much that is “familiar, yet somehow strange” – and worth thinking about.’ -- Angela Fernandez * Jotwell: The Journal of Things we Like (LOTS) March2016 *
‘This intriguing book provides an important understanding of legal writing—whether on the part of lawyers, judges, or police officers who are writing reports—and how to conceptualize and analyze it.’ -- G.C. David * Choice Magazine vol 53:07:2016 *
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Cost of Persuasion: Figure, Story, and Eloquence in the Rhetoric of Judicial Discourse 2. Pure and Impure Styles: Formalism and Pragmatism in the Language of Decision Writing 3. The Perils of Analogy: Legal World-Making and Judicial Self Fashioning in Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad 4. Murder, They Wrote: The Rhetoric of Causation in the Language of the Law 5. Narrative Theory and the Art of Judgment: The Anatomy of a Supreme Court Decision 6. The Look in his Eyes: Rusk v. State, State v. Rusk 7. Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Law Postscript: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and Scepticism
