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)