Victorian Precedents: Narrative Form, Law Reports and Stare Decisis

Abstract

Victorian-era law reports are often choppy or truncated, miserly in detail, and utterly lacking in character descriptions, creating what I have identified as an “anti-narrative” style. This article shows how the law reports use narrative conventions — often in counter-intuitive ways — to manifest the tension between a concrete case and the abstract rule which is its potential precedent. Incorporating a discussion of nineteenth-century theories of legal precedent and the history of common law reporting with a formal analysis, I contend that the insular “anti-narrative” form of the reports enables the communal nature and goal of precedential reasoning: the creation of a common law, dating from “time immemorial.” It also reveals a legal doctrine — and a narrative genre — in crisis.