Law stories

"War Stories" is the phrase used by academic lawyers to disparage the ways practicing lawyers talk about their experiences. Still, much of what matters about law eludes most academic writings. Perhaps, as a consequence, legal scholarship is awash in new methodologies designed to illuminate how law shapes and is shaped by its enforcers, interpreters, and those it regulates.

Celebrating "storytelling," books and articles for more than a decade have featured an array of stories, both fiction and nonfiction, reflecting various experiences with law and discussing the role of storytelling in conventional law practice. Still we have relatively few stories of the actual experiences of clients and lawyers in concrete legal contexts. Gary Bellow and Martha Minow in Law Stories have gathered a group of stories that answers this need. Law Stories is a body of narrative work which reflects multiple points of view, textured depictions of conventional practices and institutional cultures, and insights into how the legal workers and those affected by law make their choices, understand their actions, and experience the frustrations and satisfactions they entail. The essays in Law Stories are all first-person accounts of law problems and the way they were handled, written by lawyers involved in the problems.