The law of the oppressed: storytelling in (poetic) legal arguments

Abstract

Storytelling as a method for knowledge production has long been introduced and adopted in legal settings, particularly by critical legal scholars. The contributions of the method have been acknowledged, but it has also been criticized. The present paper is interested in one criticism: the idea that the verifiability of personal stories is impossible and, hence, that storytelling-based legal arguments are unacceptable or weak. This paper does not offer one final answer to this criticism, but it provisionally suggests that, if storytelling-based legal arguments are analyzed in a holistic manner, we can see that even if the stories that, at their core, cannot be verified- or, in the limit, even if they are not true -the broader social claims that derive from them and that anchor the legal argument, can - and should.