Narrative Analysis as a Bridge between Humanistic and Legal Clinics Methodology. American and Italian Connections

Abstract

Presenting itself as exemplifying a certain postmodernist trend, the law and narrative approach has used methodological rigor to achieve success, riding the wave of the cultural and narrative turn of the seventies and eighties in such a way as to define the study of legal narrativity as a “useful enterprise,” imagining that narration constitutes a legal category in its own right. If in Jerome Frank’s day narration was generally associated with the linguistic distortions and manipulations practiced by attorneys and witnesses, it later came to be analyzed in terms of the consistency and plausibility of the stories told for the purpose of persuading a jury and, more recently, as a tool for coherently modelling fact and also as a tool for practicing clinical lawyering and case theory. The result is that we can now attribute additional values to narrations: a) as a method to analyse legal cases and re-construct facts in context; b) as a method to educate lawyers and other legal actors towards a more conscious use of storytelling in their daily activities; c) and as a device to include voices that are silenced or marginalised within legal discourse. Intended as a contribution to this debate, the paper offers a “narrative legal analysis” – situated in a civil law system – proposing the design of a research action that gives due consideration to voices that are otherwise not heard.