‘A Says That B Sees What C Is Doing’
摘要
Jurisprudence can be viewed as a chain of stories and there are always more stories than meet the eye. How can we train legal students to critically reflect on this insight? In this chapter, we present the didactical framework and outcome of our interdisciplinary course ‘Narratives in Law’ in the minor ‘Language, Law and Culture.’ We explain how we use a four-stage model for interdisciplinary learning – focusing on Disciplinary Grounding, Perspective Taking, Finding Common Ground and Integrating Perspectives (Repko & Szostak 2021) – as a framework for inviting students to reflect on the role story making plays in law making (Brooks 2006; Boyd White 1999). We use Bal’s theory on narrators and focalizers to teach legal students how they can distinguish who is and who is not speaking and perceiving in legal texts. Bal’s definition of a story – ‘A says that B sees what C is doing’ (Bal 2002: 146) – clarifies that in narrative texts a narrator (A) is telling us that a character (B) is perceiving what another character (C) is doing. That means that both narrators and characters can be focalizers. By introducing the case study of the Chavez-Vilchez case from the EU Court of Justice and coupling it with a creative writing assignment plus critical reflection, we integrate perspectives from law and narratology, inviting students to critically reflect on the relations between European law, empathy, affect, position-taking, and power (Gaakeer 2021). Based on our didactical experiences, we formulate recommendations towards combining law and literature in future legal education.