Giddul's Wife and the Power of the Court: On Talmudic Law, Gender, Divorce, and Exile (original) (raw)
Related papers
I imagine that when Robert Cover's Nomos and Narrative essayl first reached the editors of the Harvard Law Review, their befuddlement derived not so mqch from Cover's framing of his review of the 1982 Supreme Court term with a philosophically opaque discussion of the interdependence of law and narrative, but from' the illustrations that he drew from biblical and rabbinic texts of ancient and medieval times. For Cover, both intellectually and as a matter of personal commitment, these ancient texts evoke a "nomian world," rooted more in communally shared stories of legal origins and utopian ends than in the brutalities of institutional enforcement, one from which modem legal theory and practice have much to learn and to emulate. Since my own head is buried most often in such ancient texts, rather than in modem courts, I thought it appropriate to reflect, by way of offering more such texts for our consideration, on the long-standing preoccupation with the intersection and interdependency of the discursive modes of law and narrative in Hebrew biblical and rabbiriic literature, without, I hope, romanticizing them. Indeed, I wish to demonstrate that what we might think of as a particularly modem tendency to separate law from narrative, has itself an ancient history, and to show how that tendency, while recurrent, was as recurrently resisted from within Jewish tradition. In particular, at those cultural turning points in which laws are extracted or codified from previous narrative settings, I hope to show that they are aiso renarrativized (or remythologized) so as to address, both ideologically and rhetorically, changed socio-historical settings. 2 I will do so through admittedly
Law and Narrative: A Bibliography of Recent Work
Social Science Research Network, 2017
This bibliography collects work focused specifically on law and narrative, published (approximately) over the last four years (i.e., 2013-17). A significant amount of work touches on narrative, without taking that as its focus; this work will be included in a bibliography of recent work on law and literature more generally (now being compiled). I have tried to link to non-paywalled versions, but in many cases that was not possible. Entries listed under the collections and special journal issues in section I are not listed individually in section II.
Narrative in the Legal Text: Judicial Opinions and Their Narratives*
Narrative and Metaphor in the Law
Please refer to the published version to quote or cite: https://books.google.ca/books?id=NP5DDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA121&dq=%22Judicial+Opinions+and+The ir+Narratives%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiI1piyuqjYAhUI0YMKHf2kA4QQ6AEIKTAA#v=one page&q=%22Judicial%20Opinions%20and%20Their%20Narratives%22&f=false Abstract: the law's most familiar and characteristic mode of written expression, the judgment, lacks two of the key ingredients that contribute to the lure of literary narrativenamely, the drive, fueled by uncertainty and anticipation, that propels readers on towards the conclusion, and the pleasure of observing and reflecting on others' mental states, which accounts for a considerable part of fiction's cognitive appeal. The absence of these features should alert us to the questionable premises underlying any treatment of the judgment as simply one more form of narrative, whose fundamental similarity to novels and films can be taken for granted. Using a few fundamental concepts in the study of narrative, involving the definition of plot and the power of the "reality effect" (whose analogue, I propose, is the "legality effect"), this chapter asks what we can learn about legal decisions by considering them as a distinctive kind of narrative, rather than summarily lumping them together with literary narratives. Narrative is essential to numerous aspects of legal practice and writing, from pleading and negotiation to the interpretation of evidence and conflict resolution. Indeed, one of the earliest senses of narrator in English, dating from the thirteenth century, refers to a pleader or serjeant-at-law tasked with reciting a party's statement. 1 Yet the law's most familiar and characteristic mode of written expression, the judgment, lacks two of the key ingredients that contribute to the lure of literary narrative-namely, the drive, fueled by uncertainty and anticipation, that propels readers on towards the conclusion, and the pleasure of observing and 1
Narrative and the Origins of Law
Law and Humanities, 2011
As Robert Cover reminded us in Nomos and Narrative, law is inescapably replete with stories, and '[f]or every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture'. 1 Law is full of stories, whether these are stories that are told in the courtroom as lawyers try to weave together compelling and competing versions of an event, in the legislative histories that subtend a body of statutes, or in stories about the origins and acceptance of legal systems. In the traditional law and literature context, the primary focus on stories in the law is to analyse the narrative forms they take within the courtroom. There is, however, a set of narratives that preexists the narratives that develop in and around the courtroom. These are stories about the genesis and development of law itself, prior to its arrival in the courtroom and prior even to its acceptance via the historical moments of constitutional writing. These stories about the origin of law take the reader back to a time and place before the establishment of legal structures and ask the reader to imagine the 'state of nature' or the 'original position'-moments when socio-legal institutions, codes, and norms of justice are not yet entrenched or even written down, when everything is still up for debate. These narratives present the reader with a privileged moment of contracting, the acceptance of an agreement to the mutual benefit of all newly minted citizens, and imply a final and perpetual rule of law and reign of justice. These social contract narratives help to define law, and its essential qualities and goals, as much as any other legal narratives, and they lay the groundwork for subsequent understandings of how law should operate. Building stories about a population joining together to form a social contract, these narratives all share a deep family resemblance. Whether the theory is written in prerevolutionary France or post-cold war America, social contract narratives across time and culture share fundamental elements that connect them as iterations of what one might call a super-narrative or a 'masterplot'. In each instance, the social contract narrative begins in a pre-contract space, one that each social contract theorist artfully tailors to his own end and populates with individuals who are at various points self-(2011) 5(1) Law and Humanities 11-22 11
Stories, Law, and Justice – on the Place of Narratives in the Field of Law and Humanities
Narratives in the Criminal Process, 2021
Narratives as Models of Reality A narrative is not only a narrative; it is not only what we normally call a story. Stories, and narratives, are complex entities, with structures, forms, and functions that exceed the common meaning in the common use of the phrase »to tell a story.« Especially when discussing legal narratives, we should take into consideration that narratives are not stories about a factual reality but almost always models of a possible factual reality. This is what I am going to discuss here-how narratives are potential models of reality and what consequences this might have for our definition of stories in court, legal discourse, and the place of narratives in the field of law and humanities. I will discuss this by sketching a brief history of narratology, beginning with the Russian formalists and ending with Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulated models of reality. Narrative constellations: Narratology and beyond Another way to put the question of narratives as models of reality is to say that narratives have other aspects than what narratology can lay bare. In this article, I should like to point out certain limitations and dangers of a narratological approach to law. It is important that we reflect upon the philosophical basis and the hermeneutic preconditions for the investigation of legal narratives, and that we take a critical look at the framework that we employ when working with narratives and narratology-especially when it comes to legal narratives and stories in court. My suggestion is based on my own experience from 20 years work with narratives in the criminal process, and before that, another 20 years work with
2010
It has already been some time now since the theory and method of Law and Literature first developed the narrative model for analyzing legal and literary sources.This model, founded on a view of man as homo narrans, describes a tendency to observe the law as narrative, applying this idea equally to law and to any other product of culture. Thus literary narrations (as well as ones from the nonliterary arts) have been considered not only as a mirror in which law is critically reflected, but as tools useful in bringing to us what may be described as “law’s unheard voices.” It is mainly along this line investigation that the narrative approach has developed in the United States, as a technique by which to construct alternative stories - based on personal experiences, whether real or fictional—to be brought into comparison with law’s “official” narratives. Looking at these “alternative” and “official” texts in comparison has made it possible to show that the law is itself narrative, such that law has no claim to objectivity and cannot invoke a single, universalizing discourse; but even more so, we have learned from this comparative study that the narrative which law consists of has shut out the perspective of minority groups. It is these concerns that form the backdrop against which the storytelling movement has sprung up, and its aim remains that of putting the narratives and claims of the weak on an equal footing with the law’s narrative of the strong, in such a way as to encourage between them a dialogue and an exchange. We have seen in this sense numerous “legal” narratives put together by women and blacks, and generally by those belonging to groups having little protection: these stories draw on the theory of narrative to ground and develop a rights movement proper.Of course, the law which Law as Narrative looks at is the positive law, and the approach is thus concerned with formalized law (the law set down in the law books), or with the law in the process of being formalized through the court’s activity, or with the unformalized law urged by those claiming rights and a corresponding status that they feel they are legitimately entitled to.But Law as Narrative has some further potential still waiting to be developed. I thus propose here to develop the idea of law as narrative working from a conception of law that takes into account not only positivized law but also the law permeating the fabric of social relations. And so we have to do here with law such as it manifests itself in culture understood in an anthropological and sociological sense.The discussion will revolve around rights and rules, and not just law; and it will also take into account such rules as can exist and can be pronounced only as possible, which is what Carbonnier meant by nonlaw: together with law, nonlaw forms part of that broader legal realm inclusive of social life which Carbonnier refers to as juridicite.Culture is understood as a symbolic universe that provides the meanings necessary for mediation, but it is also the space where the function is carried out (among others) of bringing order to social relations, and this function reveals itself in the process whereby we create and affirm (as well as reaffirm and recognize) rules of behaviour that stabilize mutual expectations in such a way as to enable coexistence when the social order weakens. In this broader sense, then, any narration that has a role in helping to establish an order in the realm of the symbolic can be considered a legal narration.I thus propose here to do two things, in short: (1) to work out and defend a theory of legal narration; and (2) to offer a model for analyzing narrations, making it possible to fruitfully understand the modalities and contents of the social function served by such legal narrations as are found not only in the “official” texts of positive law but also in the “texts” produced by the other arts.