Is legal writing narrative? How about judgments, appeals, testimony? We talk with Simon Stern about narrative and its techniques and effects, suspense, dicta, authorial purposes, a crazy idea for a novel, mathematical proofs, and more.

This show’s links:

Simon Stern’s faculty profile and writing
Simon Stern, Narrative in the Legal Text: Judicial Opinions and Their Narratives
William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book II: Of the Rights of Thing (Simon Stern, ed.); Simon’s introduction to the volume
William Brewer and Edward Lichtenstein, Event Schemas, Story Schemas, and Story Grammars
About the Paradox of Suspense
Jonathan D. Leavitt et al., Story Spoilers Don’t Spoil Stories; Jonathan D. Leavitt et al., The Fluency of Spoilers: Why Giving Away Endings Improves Stories
Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative (Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur, eds.) (Introduction to the book)
Mitchel Lasser, The European Pasteurization of French Law
Owen Barfield, This Ever Diverse Pair
Wikipedia on epistolary novels
Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members
Oral Argument 48: Legal Truth (guest Lisa Kern Griffin)
Special Guest: Simon Stern.