Over at
JOTWELL,
Angela Fernandez (University of Toronto - Law) has posted an admiring review of
Creating Legal Worlds: Story and Style in a Culture of Argument (2015), by
Greig Henderson (University of Toronto - English Department). Here are the first two paragraphs of the review:
Creating Legal Worlds, a new book by Greig Henderson,
an English professor at the University of Toronto, is about rhetoric
and the law and how story-telling is intrinsic to the law. Henderson
revisits famous cases (and introduces readers to new cases) in which
judges use a variety of rhetorical techniques to engage in persuasive
(and, it turns out, at times, not so persuasive) story-telling.
Legal scholars will find value, especially for teaching, in
Henderson’s analysis of judgment-writing as craft. However, I think the
book has especial purchase power for legal historians, who can contrast
Henderson’s approach to cases with the way they generally approach cases
and their context. Rather than emphasizing the details of a case and
its surrounding circumstances, Henderson emphasizes the technique of the
judge as a writer. He explains the literary and rhetorical techniques
that judges use (consciously and unconsciously) in order to paint a
scene, play on a presumption or prejudice, generate empathy or
reassurance that the right result has been reached with cool, clear and
unemotional speech.
Read on
here.
