In David Lodge’s send-ups of academic life, scholarly pilgrims jet from conference to conference, searching for good weather, congenial cocktail hours, and some harmless jockeying for professional place. But no one ever took the events seriously enough to suggest publishing the papers they delivered. This, however, is a confessional age. No longer content with the private pleasures of a minor tax advantage, academics now feel impelled to share the results of their boondoggled holidays with the rest of us. Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law is just such a book.

Touted by Yale University Press as an “important volume” and a “provocative and fascinating exploration of the entanglement of storytelling, the law, and justice in America,” the book is an assemblage of twenty-one papers delivered by an assortment of well-known academics and various other guests at a symposium convened to discuss the currently hot topic of “narrative.” It is academia’s answer to commercial publishing’s “instant book.” Or, perhaps a hardcover publication is the price of getting this “stunning array of experts” (Yale’s publicity kit again) to New Haven in the middle of February.

From the opening pair of essays by the volume’s editors—Yale professors Peter Brooks (comparative literature) and Paul Gewirtz (law, but better known as Zoë Baird’s husband)—to the closing pièce de résistance by none other than Catharine MacKinnon, the volume fairly strains with effort to celebrate the postmodern sensibility. Like so many interdisciplinary affairs these days, it promises literary critics trying to sound like law professors and law professors trying to sound like anything but law professors, all of them committed to “voicing the stories of the unvoiced” and “destabilizing dominant social narratives.” It features essays grouped under the rubrics “Storytelling in Legal Discourse,” “The Construction of Cases,” “Excludable Stories,” and “The Rhetoric of the Judicial Opinion.” Despite these impressive titles, however, there is a good deal less here than meets the eye.

First of all, many of the participants appear more than mildly unsure of what the conference was supposed to be about. The writers resort to various strategems—easily recognized by those of us with long service in the academic trenches—to disguise their embarrassment. Some try the definitional route: mulling over the possible options without hazarding a conclusion. Others helpfully guess at what the organizers must have wanted. Still others simply write about something legal, however unrelated, with a few references to narrative sprinkled on top like parsley on an otherwise ordinary dish. As a variation on the last, some tell us everything they know, from Hegel to historiography, hoping to score a direct hit. But, whatever the stratagem, the end product is twenty-one disparate essays in search of a theme.

In fact, many of the participants simply opt for straightforward discussions of legal craft—as in, How to Cobble Together a Case Based on the Facts at Hand to Persuade a Judge or Jury. For example, Alan Dershowitz builds on Chekhov’s advice to a novice writer—a gun hanging on the wall in Act One must be used by Act Three—to discuss how defense counsel must disrupt the flow of the prosecutor’s narrative in a world in which jurors are disposed to think of life as having the orderly plot lines of fiction. (Mr. Dershowitz’s contribution may be taken as an indication of the Simpson trial’s recurring presence in the volume.)

Given how earnestly the narrative agenda is pressed as the conference’s selling point, it is striking that contributor after contributor rejects the premise that in law, as in literature, the emotive force of stories trumps reason. Repeatedly, essayists assert that law cannot be treated as literature, since, among other things, law’s coercive power obliges its practitioners to develop analytically satisfying arguments. In Judge Pierre Leval’s words, it is a “flip abdication of duty” for a judge to substitute rhetoric for logic in an opinion, since reasoned explanation, not emotion, provides guidance to bench, bar, and public about what the law requires. Or, in Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman’s graceful observation, itself illustrated by a story from Plato, stories themselves do not supply the means of choosing between stories or deciding which stories are more valuable than others.

Faced with this lukewarm response to the subject, what is the reader to make of the conference’s project of applying the rhetoric of narrative to law? It seems only fair to see how this agenda plays out in the pieces contributed by the editors (and apparent organizers of the conference), Professors Gewirtz and Brooks. Presumably, they, at least, should know what they had in mind. The result demonstrates that Athens, indeed, has little to do with Jerusalem.

In his essay “Storytelling Without Fear? Confession in Law and Literature,” Professor Brooks compares Supreme Court decisions governing the admissibility of a defendant’s confession as evidence at trial— which focus on excluding statements tainted by government coercion—with the literary genre of confession represented, inter alios, by Rousseau, Camus, and the Marquis de Sade. Although it is difficult to see how the two halves of the essay bear on one another (the commentator, Elaine Scarry, a professor of English at Harvard, simply gave up on the literary discussion), my impression is that Professor Brooks finds in the confessional urge, both real and fictional, a form of compulsion that undermines the narrator’s reliability in both life and art.

While this may be all well and good in theory, it rather misses the point that crimes occur, defendants confess, and courts have cases to decide. Although each step that Brooks takes is logical enough, as Professor Scarry remarks, he arrives at a point where the accused—often the only remaining eyewitness—is inherently incompetent to advise us of the accuracy of the charges against him. Now, this is especially cruel because in our criminal justice system, confession before trial moderates the defendant’s punishment. In Professor Brooks’ legal order, the defendant would not be able to confess but would be able to testify at trial and perjure himself, a gesture that ordinarily enhances the defendant’s sentence.

But, after all, despite his reading of cases, Professor Brooks teaches literature, not law. What about Professor Gewirtz, who is a law professor trying his hand at literature? His effort, a particularly woolly piece entitled “Victims and Voyeurs: Two Narrative Problems at the Criminal Trial,” shows literature departments to great advantage.

Because story scholarship strives to speak for the silenced members of society, Professor Gewirtz gamely stakes out the most silent class of all: “The absence of the murder victim at trial can be a gaping absence, but it is still absence, and presence is almost always more vivid than absence. Thus murder victims have a certain comparative disadvantage in the competing narratives of a trial”—not to mention the absolute disadvantage of being dead. The specific issue at hand is the use of “victim impact statements,” which give the victim (or his survivors) a direct voice in determining a defendant’s sentence, in capital cases as well as others. The vehicle for Gewirtz’s discussion, I might add, is a case already overruled by the Supreme Court, giving the piece a slightly beside-the-point quality.

On the substantive issue, Gewirtz appears unsure of his own position, as if he can’t quite tell on which side of the fence to come down. On the one hand, he seems to believe in a “bounded” use of victim accounts so as to limit their emotional impact—which, one would have thought, was the point of the whole exercise in the first place. On the other hand, he piously worries that victim testimony may be bad for the victim since storytelling is “often a risky and anxious business.” Left to the readers’ own consideration is whether giving formal voice to the personal interests of the victim in sentencing erodes the public nature of justice and marks a return to private vengeance.

As to the public’s role in trials (the “voyeurs” of the title), Gewirtz exhibits similar inconsistency parading as moderation. The ordinary public has an increasing fascination with criminal trials; this engagement is related to the “rise of the Oprah-style television talk show” where the audience is invited to judge deviant behavior based on the “the implicit credo of … ‘I feel, therefore I may judge’ ”; “Oprah” has led the public to believe that it is entitled, as it watches Court TV and C-Span, to make independent assessments of the defendant’s guilt and the justice system; which, in turn, has led to the “grotesque spectacles” of the Simpson trial and the general decline of representative government. Having excoriated this media-generated voyeurism, Professor Gewirtz ties it all up by announcing that one reason victim impact evidence has a place at trial is that the victim’s story is “what the public connects with most.” I’m still not sure how narrative fits in. Res ipsa loquitur.

All in all, this symposium is a rather tame version of the kind of story scholarship that has been infecting the legal academy of late; apologetically absent is a contribution (committed for publication elsewhere) by Professor Richard Delgado, who has generated—at last count—eleven “Rodrigo Chronicles” in which a student of color instructs a willing law professor in the ways of postmodern intellectual life. Even Professor MacKinnon’s brief conclusion (with only a paragraph or so about pimps and rape, the only mention of sex in the book) is pallid compared to her usual stuff—although she does seem a bit out of temper with the conference participants for not getting the point. The significance of the book is not in what it is, but in what it is striving to ally itself with.

As practiced by law faculties, narrative or story scholarship appears in several guises. One attempts to use the methods of literary criticism to analyze legal institutions, treating the process of adjudication as a struggle between competing narratives for emotive ascendancy. Another, which often takes the form of autobiography, seeks by means of stories to voice the claims of outsiders (particularly of oppressed tenured law professors, an oxymoron if ever there was one). Whatever the form, story scholarship builds on the premise that reasoned communication between people who do not share the same life experiences is impossible and that “reality” is socially constructed and, therefore, utterly malleable. As a result, story scholarship denies the possibility of a shared public culture (something that is essential for democracy) at the same time that it demands affirmation from that very culture.

What explains the legal academy’s headlong rush into the kind of postmodern theory whose results—to steal a phrase from Frank Kermode—have been, at best, “interestingly catastrophic” in the humanities? For academics in the humanities, the answer is clear. The law is a particularly ripe territory for exploitation: witness the recent defections to law faculties by Stanley Fish (Duke University) and Martha Nussbaum (University of Chicago). As Professor Brooks candidly confesses in his introduction, he is drawn to the study of law because it represents an “exceptional intersection of textuality and social power,” leaving the reader to entertain the suspicion that the social power involved is that of the humanities professor, rather than any other oppressed group.

As to the attraction for legal academics, the answer is less clear. Being one, I am half tempted to say that law unmodified is dull and leave it at that. But, of course, the answer is more complicated. A first stab might indict the Critical Legal Studies movement, which asserted that all legal decisions are determined by social or political factors and, accordingly, claimed to have disproved the possibility of the rule of law. Espoused by a cadre of left-wing legal academics whose career trajectory parallelled that of other tenured radicals in academia, “CLS” eventually spawned such progeny as critical race studies and feminist legal studies. The influence of postmodernism is exacerbated by the fact that elite legal publications—the gateway to law-school tenure— are edited by students who have been exposed to the radical intellectual agenda since reaching college, if not before.

A survey of any legal periodical can reveal the results: articles entitled “An Absolutely, Positively True Story: Seven Reasons Why We Sing” (encouraging the use of song in legal pedagogy because song is a medium through which subordinated people defy “the voice of domination”), “Disaggregating Gender from Sex and Sexual Orientation: The Effeminate Man in the Law and Feminist Jurisprudence” or, if you prefer the interdisciplinary approach, a symposium on ancient law in which the lawyerly participants, mixing with genuine classicists, opine on such matters as Biblical interpretation unburdened by any knowledge of ancient languages. Where these excesses will lead is anyone’s guess. But, if there is any solace to be gained, it may be in Law’s Stories’s own softly voiced tale of resistance to narrative.