Year: 1984
Author: Leigh Buchanan Bienen
Publisher: Harvard Law Review
Issue: Volume 98, No. 2, pp. 494-502
Description: The Law as Storyteller: The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis. Criminal cases are especially rich in drama and narrative. They present stories raising fundamental questions of life and liberty. In ‘The Return of Martin Guerre’, Professor Natalie Zemon Davis recounts one such story, a sixteenth century tale that never would have been preserved had not the law assumed the role of storyteller.
For me, the surprise of law school was that the law was full of stories. Between the sober brown and dark blue covers of those heavy casebooks were chronicles of greed and reports of the unchanging lust for power. No one had mentioned this. The law, which I had expected to be composed only of abstract principles and finely honed precepts, turned out to encompass an odd and assorted jumble of snapshots from history, snippets of lives of the great and the humble as they passed through the legal system on their way elsewhere. 3
Criminal cases are especially rich in drama and narrative. They present stories raising fundamental questions of life and liberty. In The Return of Martin Guerre, Professor Natalie Zemon Davis recounts one such story, a sixteenth century tale that never would have been preserved had not the law assumed the role of storyteller. Davis draws substantially from legal materials, primarily the commentary of Jean de Coras, 4 an appellate judge in the case of Martin Guerre. The result is a historian’s illumination of a perplexing legal story, one that illustrates both the richness and limitations of the law as historical record…
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