Aspects of Legal Narrative

In the conception of narrative developed by Labov (Labov, 1972, 1981, 1997; Labov & Waletzky, 1967/1997), the typical narrative is that of personal experience. The core formal element of this type of narrative is its temporal organization, and in particular the juxtaposition of two events that cannot be reversed while preserving the coherence of the story (a “temporal junction” (Labov, 1981, p.225)). Another formal constraint on narratives concerns their overall organization. In general, a narrative will start with a brief abstract and/or orientation section, which is followed by complicating actions, a resolution, and possibly a coda. Sprinkled throughout the entire narrative, though appearing frequently in the complicating action and resolution areas, are evaluative statements (Labov, 1972, pp.386–70). Functionally, a narrative is constrained to be a communication of “tellable” or “reportable” events (e.g., Labov & Waletzky, 1967/1997; Labov, 1997). Because the oral narrative is a rather unusual form of conversational turn, there must be some special significance to the message conveyed. Labov calls this “reportability.” A story with high reportability will hold the interest of the listener/reader, and will stave off questions like “so what?” and “who cares?” This sort of analysis has been profitably applied to a narrow class of speech acts, in particular narratives of the “near-death experience.” However, it is an open question as to how far such a framework can be extended to other genres of language use. Some, such as Ochs and Capps (2001) look at cooperative, multi-agent produced narratives, and find that the distinctions and categories that Labov proposes for his narratives are not entirely up to the task of analyzing all narratives. Indeed, it may be that much of spontaneous speech and conversation is unlikely to fit very easily into the very special sort of speech category that Labov is concerned with. In this paper I will examine the other end of the spectrum—legal briefs submitted to appellate courts. These documents are formulaic in the extreme, containing several elements that remain unchanged from document to document and author to author. However, because the attorneys involved have the task of persuading a panel of judges of their cause, there