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20 Legal Stud. F. 83 (1996)
Narrative Resistance and the Struggle for Stories

handle is hein.journals/lstf20 and id is 103 raw text is: NARRATIVE RESISTANCE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR STORIES KIM LANE SCHEPPELE I have been working for the last year and a half in a court which hears no stories. A model petition to this court reads: Paragraph 47 of the 25th law of 1991 violates Article 70A of the Constitution. It's as if you're a student taking a test and the only instruction is: Discuss. So, what do you do, if you're a judge, with a petition like this? Well, first you look up paragraph 47 of the law. Then you look at article 70a of the constitution. Then you work out whether there is an abstract logical space in which the two are inconsistent. If there is any such space, the statute is unconstitutional. If you can hold both in your mind without logical inconsistency, then the statute is fine. When you have figured this out, then you write. Of course, this exercise is not the way we lawyers in common law systems have learned to think about judging. It's not the way we file briefs with a court either. And it's not the way we teach. If a judge in America tried to write an opinion without facts, she would be held not to have been acting as a judge at all. Instead, she'd be a philosopher or a legal theorist. If a lawyer in America tried to file that single sentence about paragraph 47 as a brief with the Supreme Court, she'd be liable to a charge of frivolous lawyering - if she were in fact recognized as having made any sort of legal claim at all. If a law professor in America taught a class using only abstract interpretation as a method, she would not be preparing her students for the real world of law. And she'd have a very hard time finding a textbook to use. We (those who subscribe to American law as a set of practices) need cases; we thrive on facts. With facts, we make stories, and we worry about the application of rules to the stories we make. But the petition about paragraph 47 that I have just described is in fact the model form that requests for judicial review take at the Constitutional Court in Hungary. I won't go on about the competencies and practices of the Hungarian Constitutional Court in any detail - except to say that it is the most powerful court in the world - but I do want to make one point. If you write a long personal story, full of the authority of the pronoun I and carrying what *Kim Lane Scheppel is Professor of Law, Political Science and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania and Co-Director, Program on Gender and Culture, Central European University, Budapest. This essay is based on a presentation at the American Association of Law Schools, San Antonio, Texas, January 6, 1996.

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