NCJ Number
142210
Journal
Journal of Legal Education Volume: 42 Issue: 1 Dated: (March 1992) Pages: 129-138
Date Published
1992
Length
10 pages
Annotation
This essay provides an overview of an experimental course, Law and Popular Storytelling, taught at the University of Connecticut School of Law during the spring semesters of 1990 and 1991.
Abstract
The course was intended to revivify and reconnect the upper-level students' innate sense of narrative, i.e., to recapture imaginations exhausted by 3 years of reading appellate cases. The course had students study movies, memoirs, and journals about convicts, criminals, prisoners, and outlaws. The course had no precise or obvious objectives particularly relevant to traditional legal education. Instead, the course left students free to react to the stories without any preconceived agenda for response. Some students found behavior to be emulated or avoided; others vicariously experienced moral dilemmas. Generally, they gleaned from the study of assigned books and movies a habit of mind that led them to be more empathic. More often than not, they came away unsettled from their confrontations with protagonists on the margins of society, as mediated by the director or novelist. The course had to do with law only insofar as lawyers are popular cultural storytellers and may have something to learn from other storytellers working the same area. Also, the overarching substantive theme of the materials (convicts, criminals, prisoners, and outlaws) is sufficiently proximate to material studied in law school to justify including the course in the curriculum. The unifying theme in the materials ostensibly concerned the visions and stories of "outsiders." The covert themes of class discussions, however, went beyond analysis of the significance of the literal events of these stories and explored concerns of style as well as substance, of voice and vision, and of complex aesthetic judgments as well as easier moral ones. 11 footnotes