Fictional Discourse and the Law

Fictional Discourse and the Law PDF Author: Hans J. Lind
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429887612
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on insights from literary theory and analytical philosophy, this book analyzes the intersection of law and literature from the distinct and unique perspective of fictional discourse. Pursuing an empirical approach, and using examples that range from Victorian literature to the current judicial treatment of rap music, the volume challenges the prevailing fact–fiction dichotomy in legal theory and practice by providing a better understanding of the peculiarities of legal fictionality, while also contributing further material to fictional theory’s endeavor to find a transdisciplinary valid criterion for a definition of fictional discourse. Following the basic presumptions of the early law-as-literature movement, past approaches have mainly focused on textuality and narrativity as the common denominators of law and literature, and have largely ignored the topic of fictionality. This volume provides a much needed analysis of this gap. The book will be of interest to scholars of legal theory, jurisprudence and legal writing, along with literature scholars and students of literature and the humanities.

Fictional Discourse and the Law

Fictional Discourse and the Law PDF Author: Hans J. Lind
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429887612
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Drawing on insights from literary theory and analytical philosophy, this book analyzes the intersection of law and literature from the distinct and unique perspective of fictional discourse. Pursuing an empirical approach, and using examples that range from Victorian literature to the current judicial treatment of rap music, the volume challenges the prevailing fact–fiction dichotomy in legal theory and practice by providing a better understanding of the peculiarities of legal fictionality, while also contributing further material to fictional theory’s endeavor to find a transdisciplinary valid criterion for a definition of fictional discourse. Following the basic presumptions of the early law-as-literature movement, past approaches have mainly focused on textuality and narrativity as the common denominators of law and literature, and have largely ignored the topic of fictionality. This volume provides a much needed analysis of this gap. The book will be of interest to scholars of legal theory, jurisprudence and legal writing, along with literature scholars and students of literature and the humanities.

Fiction and the Languages of Law

Fiction and the Languages of Law PDF Author: Karen Petroski
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351163825
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
Contemporary legal reasoning has more in common with fictional discourse than we tend to realize. Through an examination of the U.S. Supreme Court’s written output during a recent landmark term, this book exposes many of the parallels between these two special kinds of language use. Focusing on linguistic and rhetorical patterns in the dozens of reasoned opinions issued by the Court between October 2014 and June 2015, the book takes nonlawyer readers on a lively tour of contemporary American legal reasoning and acquaints legal readers with some surprising features of their own thinking and writing habits. It analyzes cases addressing a huge variety of issues, ranging from the rights of drivers stopped by the police to the decision-making processes of the Environmental Protection Agency—as well as the term’s best-known case, which recognized a constitutional right to marriage for same-sex as well as different-sex couples. Fiction and the Languages of Law reframes a number of long-running legal debates, identifies other related paradoxes within legal discourse, and traces them all to common sources: judges’ and lawyers’ habit of alternating unselfconsciously between two different attitudes toward the language they use, and a set of professional biases that tends to prevent scrutiny of that habit.

Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law

Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law PDF Author: Steven D. Smith
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268201196
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book Here

Book Description
Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law discusses legal, political, and cultural difficulties that arise from the crisis of authority in the modern world. Is there any connection linking some of the maladies of modern life—“cancel culture,” the climate of mendacity in public and academic life, fierce conflicts over the Constitution, disputes over presidential authority? Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law argues that these diverse problems are all a consequence of what Hannah Arendt described as the disappearance of authority in the modern world. In this perceptive study, Steven D. Smith offers a diagnosis explaining how authority today is based in pervasive fictions and how this situation can amount to, as Arendt put it, “the loss of the groundwork of the world.” Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law considers a variety of problems posed by the paradoxical ubiquity and absence of authority in the modern world. Some of these problems are jurisprudential or philosophical in character; others are more practical and lawyerly—problems of presidential powers and statutory and constitutional interpretation; still others might be called existential. Smith’s use of fictions as his purchase for thinking about authority has the potential to bring together the descriptive and the normative and to think about authority as a useful hypothesis that helps us to make sense of the empirical world. This strikingly original book shows that theoretical issues of authority have important practical implications for the kinds of everyday issues confronted by judges, lawyers, and other members of society. The book is aimed at scholars and students of law, political science, and philosophy, but many of the topics it addresses will be of interest to politically engaged citizens.

Fictional Discourse

Fictional Discourse PDF Author: Stefano Predelli
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198854129
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stefano Predelli presents a novel approach to fictional discourse: Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Combining the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language, he discusses narrative time, unreliability, closure, and the distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, among other topics.

Law's Stories

Law's Stories PDF Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300146295
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically.This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality?Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.ContributorsJ. M. BalkinPeter BrooksHarlon L. DaltonAlan M. DershowitzDaniel A. FarberRobert A. FergusonPaul GewirtzJohn HollanderAnthony KronmanPierre N. LevalSanford LevinsonCatharine MacKinnonJanet MalcolmMartha MinowDavid N. RosenElaine ScarryLouis Michael SeidmanSuzanna SherryReva B. SiegelRobert Weisberg.

Narrative and Metaphor in the Law

Narrative and Metaphor in the Law PDF Author: Michael Hanne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108422799
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 439

Get Book Here

Book Description
Scholars from many disciplines discuss the crucial roles played by narrative and metaphor in the theory and practice of law.

Pragmatics of Fiction

Pragmatics of Fiction PDF Author: Miriam A. Locher
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110431092
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 628

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pragmatics of Fiction provides systematic orientation in the emerging field of studying pragmatics with/in fictional data. It provides an authoritative and accessible overview of this versatile new field in its methodological and theoretical richness. Giving center stage to fictional language allows scholars to review key concepts in sociolinguistics such as genre, style, voice, stance, dialogue, participation structure or features of orality and literariness. The contributors explore language as one of the creative tools to craft story worlds and characters by drawing on concepts such as regional, social and ethnic language variation, as well as multilingualism. Themes such as emotion, taboo language or impoliteness in fiction receive attention just as the challenges of translation and dubbing, the creation of past and future languages, the impact of fictional language on language change or the fuzzy boundaries of narratives. Each contribution, written by a leading specialist, gives a succinct, representative and up-to-date overview of research questions, theories, methods and recent developments in the field.

Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice

Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice PDF Author: Maksymilian Del Mar
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319092324
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Get Book Here

Book Description
This multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional collection offers the first ever full-scale analysis of legal fictions. Its focus is on fictions in legal practice, examining and evaluating their roles in a variety of different areas of practice (e.g. in Tort Law, Criminal Law and Intellectual Property Law) and in different times and places (e.g. in Roman Law, Rabbinic Law and the Common Law). The collection approaches the topic in part through the discussion of certain key classical statements by theorists including Jeremy Bentham, Alf Ross, Hans Vaihinger, Hans Kelsen and Lon Fuller. The collection opens with the first-ever translation into English of Kelsen’s review of Vaihinger’s As If. The 17 chapters are divided into four parts: 1) a discussion of the principal theories of fictions, as above, with a focus on Kelsen, Bentham, Fuller and classical pragmatism; 2) a discussion of the relationship between fictions and language; 3) a theoretical and historical examination and evaluation of fictions in the common law; and 4) an account of fictions in different practice areas and in different legal cultures. The collection will be of interest to theorists and historians of legal reasoning, as well as scholars and practitioners of the law more generally, in both common and civil law traditions.

The Language of Fiction

The Language of Fiction PDF Author: Emar Maier
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192585355
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume brings together new research on fiction from the fields of philosophy and linguistics. Fiction has long been a topic of interest in philosophy, but recent years have also seen a surge in work on fictional discourse at the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. In particular, there has been a growing interest in examining long-standing issues concerning fiction from a perspective that is informed both by philosophy and linguistic theory. Following a detailed introduction by the editors, The Language of Fiction contains 14 chapters by leading scholars in linguistics and philosophy, organized into three parts. Part I, 'Truth, Reference, and Imagination', offers new, interdisciplinary perspectives on some of the central themes from the philosophy of fiction: What is fictional truth? How do fictional names refer? What kind of speech act is involved in telling a fictional story? What is the relation between fiction and imagination? Part II, 'Storytelling', deals with themes originating from the study of narrative: How do we infer a coherent story from a sequence of event descriptions? And how do we interpret the words of impersonal or unreliable narrators? Part III, 'Perspective Shift', focuses on an alleged key characteristic of fictional narratives, namely how we get access to the fictional characters' inner lives, through a variety of literary techniques for representing what they say, think, or see. The volume will be of interest to scholars from graduate level upwards in the fields of discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics, philosophy of language, psychology, cognitive science, and literary studies.

Your Blues Ain't Like Mine

Your Blues Ain't Like Mine PDF Author: Bebe Moore Campbell
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 0345401123
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Get Book Here

Book Description
"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings." --The Indianapolis News "EXTRAORDINDARY." --The Seattle Times "A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story." --Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction