Whose Story Wins: Narrative Jurisprudence And The Construction Of Legal Truth
Stuti Mishra & Vrattant Singhai, B.A.LL.B. (Hons.), SVKM’s NMIMS, School of Law, Bangalore
ABSTRACT
This article challenges the connection between story, authority and the production of truth of law. Despite the purported objectivity, neutrality, and excessive precision of the law, the practice of the courtroom makes it clear that facts do not come to adjudication in the form of self-contained truths. They are selectively chosen, framed and arranged as competing narratives.
Legal decision-making is not, then, the operationalisation of rules on objective information but rather organised competition between discourses which strives to achieve a sense of coherence, plausibility and authority. The article is based on narrative jurisprudence, the critical legal theory as well as cognitive methods concerning reasoning that legal truth lies in the exchange between evidence and storytelling. Judges and jurors do not examine facts alone in fact they are assessing the appearance of an account as whole, coherent and as harmonized with wider societal demands. The prevailing cultural beliefs about what is considered right or wrong, race, gender, economic and institutional credibility may emerge as dominant in this process and may be used to subtly determine which stories are accepted and which are excluded. The cases of the most high-profile wrongful convictions, prosecutions that are all over the media, politically charged prosecutions demonstrate how persuasive framing may eclipse weak foundational evidentiary bases. Whether law is based on storytelling or not, is not the main point, but rather the extent to which this is critically and consciously so.
Through the interactivity with counter-storytelling cultures, and interests of testimonial injustice, the article brings attention to structural disparities in whose narrations get presumptive deference in legal institutions. Legal truth is a product of negotiation that is proved in an institutional procedure, on extra-evidentiary normative expectation, and on normative judgment that begs the timeless question, whose story wins?
Keywords: Legal truth; narrative jurisprudence; story telling; testimonial injustice; wrongful conviction; critical legal theory; courtroom discourse; Legal narrative; counter-storytelling.
