ABSTRACT
Any case brought to court presents a story of wrongdoing (Tiersma 1999). Witnesses expect to tell stories (Conley and O’Barr 1990), lawyers and jurors transform evidence into stories (Pennington and Hastie 1986, 1991), and even judges deliberate with the help of stories (Wagenaar et al. 1993). Yet the law as an institution has historically considered the adjudication process as a matter of rigorously testing hypotheses rather than comparing stories and so has introduced numerous anti-narrative checks to trial procedure (Keane 1996). The result is a fascinating tension between narrative and anti-narrative forces that is both played out in the hybrid discourse genres of the trial (Heffer 2005) and is fundamental to the interface between language and law more generally (Brooks and Gewirtz 1996). Stories are constructed, and have been studied, in a wide variety of different courtroom
contexts: in small claims courts (Conley and O’Barr 1990); in plea-bargaining (Maynard 1984); in magistrates’ courts (Harris 1984); in traffic courts (Cody and McLaughlin 1988); in Islamic courts (Hirsch 1998); and in historical contexts (Archer 2005 and this volume). This chapter, though, will focus on the most widely studied context, and the one where the tensions between narrative and anti-narrative forces are perhaps at their greatest: contemporary common-law criminal trials before a judge and jury. I begin with an overview of the relevance of narrative to the trial process in general.
I then work in semi-narrative fashion through the linear sequence of trial genres (jury selection ! preliminary instruction ! opening statements ! witness examination ! closing arguments ! summing-up ! deliberation and verdict ! sentencing) to show how narrative in a variety of forms manages to emerge in the trial despite the evident institutional anti-narrativity.
