Legal Stories Without Villains
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/lawreview.2026.1168Abstract
Lawyers have always been storytellers, and cognitive science is increasingly demonstrating that human beings are wired to learn through story. But legal stories may have a dark side if, as theorists have recently suggested, stories motivate pro-social action by reinforcing in-group identification and out-group hatred. In an increasingly divided polity, are we doomed to stories that drive us toward social disintegration? A solution to the legal storyteller’s dilemma may be found in an ancient source: Aristotle’s Poetics. By crafting legal stories that track the elements of the Tragedy as described by Aristotle and adapted by modern storytellers from Broadway to Hollywood, legal storytellers may use the powerful and inevitable mechanism of story to create a body of “legal Poetics” in which gripping obstacle, drama, and crisis require no Other to act as villain. This brand of legal storytelling has the power to move audiences to pro-social action in law and policy without further dividing society into the dangerously rigid us-versus-them division that currently threatens to harden into intractable conflict.
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