★★★★★ 3
Notes on Legal Style by a Law Professor and Experienced Lawyer.
Format: Kindle
BOOK REVIEW: MEYER, Philip N., Storytelling for Lawyers
ISBN: 978-0-19-5396638
Read June, 13th-27th, 2017.
This book discusses storytelling tools by presenting a series of examples of good storytelling, both in legal settings and in literary works and movies. If theoretical explanations are sometimes a bit dry, the frequent quoting of practical examples conveys fluidity and speed to the book.
After an introduction presenting lawyers as storytellers, it deals with the roles played in storytelling by Plots (chapters 2 and 3); Character (4 and 5); Voice, Perspective, Details and Images, and Rhytm and Speed (which relate to Scene and Summary) (chapter 6); Place or Story Environment (chapter 7) and Narrative Time.
Focusing maybe too narrowly on legal storytelling before American juries, plot is almost equated with melodrama. Films like Jaws and High Noon are extensively discussed, as Gerry Spence’s Closing Argument on Behalf of Karen Silkwood. The chapters on character offer interesting insights on character classification (“round” characters, with psychological depth, prone to suffer transformation as the story evolves, vs. “flat” ones), while discussing the tools for telling how a character is, as opposed to simply showing the psychological nature of each character’s character through dialogue or the actions the character performs. Examples include Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life and Jeremiah Donovan’s Closing Arguments on Behalf of Louis Failla, in a 13-week trial the Author could scrupulously attend in person.
Discussions on Voice, Perspective, Details and Images, Scene and Summary, criticize the basic assumptions of the neutrality of lawyers’ voices, exemplifies how to manage details to suggest ideas and emotions, draw on the distinction between showing and telling, and offers interesting insights into the narrative theory’s concept of stretch (the slowing of the narrative rhythm in relation to the narrated story’s). Environment depiction storytelling tools deals with Joan Didion’s The White Album and the Judicial Opinion in a Rape Case, quoting also from W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants and the Petition Briefs in Reck v. Ragen and Miranda v. Arizona. Further examples are Kathryn Harrison’s While They Slept and the Petitioner’s Brief in Eddings v. Oklahoma.
Finally, the chapter on Narrative Time draws on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and explores time, rhythm or speed, discussing more deeply stretch and the relation of time of the narrative itself with the time of the facts dealt with in the narrative. Chronology is discussed and criticized; Analepsis or Flashback is didactically explained and exemplified, both in general storytelling theory and in its legal use; the same holds for Prolepsis (Flash-forward) and Ellipsis (the intentional omission of a part of the narrative, often with the purpose of emphasizing the omitted event. Pacing and Rhythm are discussed in more lenght, with the caveat - repeated somewhat throughout the book - that legal stories are often left unfinished by the lawyer, in order to allow the jurors or judges fill the end with their decision.
The Author remarks his purpose was to suggest possible tools and ways of dealing with problems which arise in legal storytelling, and he delivers what he promises.
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Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2017
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