ABSTRACT
Narrative supplements rhetoric with a different kind of rationality, a different fragment of reality. Robin West's account of the collapse of the structure of judgment where the need for narrative is ignored highlights the importance of narrative. The literature on the interpretive moment in adjudication focuses, perhaps understandably, upon the written judgment and upon the interpretation of past judicial texts and the way in which these are woven together to answer the needs of the moment and in the process to create a new judicial text. Even more to the point, their efforts are likely to be frustrated by the shade and play of meaning in the judgment, the half formulated second argument, the absence of the kind of precise singularity they are seeking. By convention, legal interpretation has been confined to the textual, to statute and judgment, facilitating a process of analogy that allows to understand it as somehow akin to literary interpretation.
