Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons Faculty Scholarship 1-1-2008 Storytelling, Narrative Rationality, and Legal Persuasion Chris Rideout Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/faculty Part of the Legal Profession Commons Recommended Citation Chris Rideout, Storytelling, Narrative Rationality, and Legal Persuasion, 14 LEGAL WRITING: J. LEGAL WRITING INST. 53 (2008). https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/faculty/315 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Seattle University School of Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. STORYTELLING, NARRATIVE RATIONALITY, AND LEGAL PERSUASION J. ChristopherRideout* "Humansare essentially storytellers." -Walter Fisher' "[T]he law always begins in story: usually in the story the client tells, whether he or she comes in off the street for the first time or adds in a phone call anotherpiece of information to a narra- tive with which the lawyer has been long, perhaps too long, fa- miliar. It ends in story, too, with a decision by a court or jury, or an agreement between the parties, about what happened and what it means." 2 -James Boyd White As James Boyd White pointed out over twenty years ago, sto- rytelling lies at the heart of what lawyers do. Every legal case starts with a story-the client's story-and it ends with a legal decision that, in effect, offers another version of that story, one cast into a legal framework.