War stories is the phrase used by academic lawyers to disparage the ways practicing lawyers talk about their experiences. Gary Bellow and Martha Minow in Law Stories have gathered a group of stories that explore the actual experiences of clients and lawyers in concrete legal contexts. The essays in Law Stories are all first-person accounts of law problems and the way they were handled, written by lawyers involved in the problems. They offer the voice and insight of the self-reflective practitioner. As such they provide us with a dimension missing from many third-person accounts of cases, a layer of emotion and perspective on legal institutions experienced by people caught or working within them. Focusing on cases arising in public interest practices, the stories deal with problems arising from child custody, parental rights in a Head Start program, the consequences of large corporate bankruptcy for the corporation’s retirees, juvenile crime, unemployment benefits, the rights of a victim of crime, the rights of welfare recipients, and the rights of small shareholders. These stories raise a variety of questions, including the nature and extent of the lawyer’s role, the way the system listens to certain kinds of stories told in certain ways and refuses to hear other stories, how participation in the legal system affects the identity of those who are involved in it and how the popular image of law and legal processes differs from the reality depicted in these cases.
This book will appeal to both practitioners and teachers of law as well as social scientists interested in studying the role and place of law in the system. The contributors include Anthony Alfieri, Gary Bellow, Lenora M. Lapidus, Alice and Staughton Lynd, Martha Minow, Nell Minow, Charles Ogletree, Abbe Smith, Lynne Weaver, and Lucie E. White. [Law Stories will] enlighten not only law students but the general and professional public who will find these accounts as compelling as any work of popular fiction. Unhappily, these accounts of law’s inadequacy as a vehicle for social justice are not fictions… . –Law and Politics Book Review Gary Bellow and Martha Minow are Professors of Law, Harvard Law School.
