Abstract

This review of the relationship of law and art in the litigative context explores ways in which the methodologies of the novelist and other artists can be invoked by the lawyer in structuring and developing a case and presenting it to a court. To the litigators who transcend the form books and stereotypes and see their cases with a fresh eye, neither the law nor the facts are fixed in stone but rather created to meet the deepest realities of the case within the context of our most fundamental values and beliefs. Litigators, by the way they define and project the issues, can affect, even determine, what law and facts are legally relevant and dispositive. They must devise and write the story that threads the client's way out of the labyrinth. Mastery of the formal requirements of litigative writing is only a necessary first step. Freewriting; Hemingwayesque choice of words and syntax; harnessing the symbolic, often hidden, power of language; achieving the dramatic potential of case presentation—all these and more from the creative artist's repertoire empower litigators to win their cases. Resort is made not only to the applicable statutory, regulatory, and case law but also to the processes of the like of Cezanne, Conrad, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, Aristotle, and Faulkner.

Journal
Journal of Business and Technical Communication
Published
1996-04-01
DOI
10.1177/1050651996010002002
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Citation Context

Cited by in this index (1)

  1. Technical Communication Quarterly

References (23)

  1. Poetics
  2. The Great World and Timothy Colt
  3. Hemingway: The Writer as Artist
  4. 10.1038/scientificamerican1274-23
  5. The Nature of the Judicial Process
Show all 23 →
  1. The Nigger of the “Narcissus.”
  2. The Sun Also Rises. By Ernest Hemingway. Three Novels by Ernest Hemingway
  3. The Paris Review Interviews Writers at Work
  4. Language in Thought and Action
  5. The Paris Review Interviews Writers at Work
  6. The Nick Adams Stories
  7. Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir
  8. The Portrait of a Lady
  9. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
  10. The Portable Jung
  11. An Editor's Treasury
  12. Anthology of Public Speeches
  13. Against Interpretation
  14. The Elements of Style
  15. Gulliver's Travels
  16. The Portable Tolstoy
  17. The Art of Styling Sentences
  18. The Paris Review Interviews Writers at Work