We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Victorian Precedents: Narrative Form, Law Reports and Stare Decisis.
- Authors
Ben-Yishai, Ayelet
- Abstract
Victorian-era law reports are often choppy or truncated, miserly in detail, and utterly lacking in character descriptions, creating what I have identified as an "anti-narrative" style. This article shows how the law reports use narrative conventions - often in counter-intuitive ways - to manifest the tension between a concrete case and the abstract rule which is its potential precedent. Incorporating a discussion of nineteenth-century theories of legal precedent and the history of common law reporting with a formal analysis, I contend that the insular "anti-narrative" form of the reports enables the communal nature and goal of precedential reasoning: the creation of a common law, dating from "time immemorial." It also reveals a legal doctrine - and a narrative genre - in crisis.
- Subjects
LAW reports, digests, etc.; STARE decisis; FORMS (Law); COMMON law; TIME immemorial (Law); JUDICIAL process
- Publication
Law, Culture & the Humanities, 2008, Vol 4, Issue 3, p382
- ISSN
1743-8721
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1177/1743872108093103