Exhuming human remains from case law: a report on the first dig

Dawn Watkins (University of Leicester) presented the findings of a research project seeking to endorse and encourage the use of narrative research in legal education.

Dawn’s slides are embedded below, and you can also download her full paper (Word file, 37 pages, 152 KB) at the bottom of the page.

Dawn’s paper and the other paper in the session, The emerging use of storytelling as an alternative teaching methodology, sparked a lively discussion. Storytelling was felt to have both intellectual and instrumental benefits, with empathy and understanding of the lay client a highly valuable perspective for the young lawyer. Gary Watt (Warwick) made the telling point that in recovering the human content of the law students were recovering their own humanity (from the numbing, dehumanising influences of ‘black letter’ legal education?).

A research project carried out at Leicester during the autumn term of 2009-10 argued that by training law students to seek out only points of law from case reports we have removed from legal education the significance of human nature, human emotion and human imagination. (The initial idea for the project was presented at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2009 and subsequently published in Web JCLI – see Exhuming human remains from case law: the role of narrative research in legal education for full details.)

Indeed, at Learning in Law Annual Conference 2009 it was argued that we (as legal educators) had buried the human actors in legal proceedings. They lie beneath the mound of textbooks and case reports we require our students to read, in their endless quest to find the ratio of a case. Narrative inquiry was proposed as a means of exhuming and rediscovering these hidden human remains.

In the project a group of third year law students was introduced to the concept of narrative structure and storytelling. They were then asked to select and read one of a selected number of case reports and to creae a fictional, narrative account of the case, written from the perspective of one of the characters in that case. There was no prescribed form or word count – short stories, plays, poems or fairy tales were all permissible – see the see the Narrative Research Project wiki for examples of the students’ work. Finally, the students were asked to describe their responses to the project on the wiki and to reflect on what they felt they had learned through being involved.

Certain challenges are faced in assessing creative writing, and it is also important to consider how far creative writing can be seen as a form of legal writing. Is it appropriate to recommend a curriculum change on some (or indeed all) undergraduate law modules in the light of this research, and how far does an acknowledgment and appreciation of the role of narrative represent an important step forward in legal pedagogy?

Nick Johnson (now retired) reports:

Dawn described her approach as not so much “case method plus” (see Michael Blissenden’s paper) as “case method abandoned”. Its origins lay in her interest in narrative and in Martha Nussbaum’s defence of the efficacy of the literary imagination in illuminating ethical questions.
 
The aim was to get students to develop and create fictional accounts from case law, exhuming the human actors from the reified world of legal principle. The project had been funded by a small grant from the university, enabling Dawn to employ a professional storyteller (Alison Davies) who had given a staff development seminar.
 
The student members of the project were all volunteers. There were 35 to begin with, which reduced to 24 after the first session with the storyteller. 19 students (16 female, three male) eventually submitted written work. Dawn took exit responses from the dropouts, whose statements fell into two categories:

• we’re not sure what we are meant to be learning
• we’re frightened of the personal exposure involved in the project, particularly in relation to public speaking
   
  Essentially the project was a free experiment in creative writing. The writing had to be fictional but be based around one case. There was no prescribed word limit or format. The students all worked in groups.
   
  An exercise in pure imagination ran counter to the mainstream of the students’ legal education. They found it hard but rewarding. It got the creative juices flowing. It also enabled them to focus, sometimes for the first time, on the underlying human content of the law, including what is often personal tragedy. The students used variable formats – stories, plays, articles. Strict assessment criteria were used.
   
  The students saw case law in a wholly new way; as personal stories with the parties having different perspectives and the judgment being the moral of the story. Their confidence increased.

About Dawn

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Dawn Watkins is a lecturer in law at the University of Leicester. Her research interests lie in the fields of law and humanities and legal education.

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Last Modified: 9 July 2010