Minding the Law: How Courts Rely On Storytelling, and How Their Stories Change the Way We Understand the Law-and Ourselves.

• Author: Bodie, Matthew T.
• Position: Book Reviews

Minding the Law: How Courts Rely On Storytelling, and How Their Stories Change the Way We Understand the Law-and Ourselves. By Anthony C. Amsterdam and Jerome Bruner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000; PP. 453. $35.00.

At a time when law is reaching out farther and wider to draw other disciplines into its study, Minding the Law serves as a reminder of just how far it might be possible to go. This imaginative work is a product of the self-described "odd pair" of Anthony Amsterdam, professor at New York University School of Law and long-time advocate in the field of civil rights and death penalty litigation, and Jerome Bruner, a cultural psychologist and professor at NYU. Amsterdam and Bruner, in an effort to make "the familiar strange again" (p.1), apply the tools of categorization, narrative, rhetoric, and culture to judicial opinions in an effort to demystify those opinions and show the logical and linguistic devices at work. Their effort, which examines landmark civil rights and death penalty opinions spanning from Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) to Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), ranges from a grammatical analysis of nouns and verbs to a sweeping cultural history of American race relations. The authors hope their text will be u sed by law students and lay readers who are "interested in the workings of the law" (p. 17). Unfortunately, because the authors chose to analyze only opinions that they believe to be "unjust" (p. 7), their descriptions of the various tools take on a very strong normative tone in the context of these opinions. This ideological thrust takes the focus away from the tools themselves and gives the book a subtext that the authors themselves disclaim.

Along with an introduction and conclusion, Minding the Law is broken down into four chapter pairings, with pairings on the topics of categorization, narrative, rhetoric, and culture. In each pairing, the first chapter presents a broad overview of the particular topic, while the second applies this overview to a particular case or cases. In the first pairing, Amsterdam and Bruner discuss categorization. The first chapter establishes the basics: why we categorize, how we categorize, and the dangers we are likely to encounter by categorizing too quickly or crudely. The authors emphasize that categories do not exist in nature, but are imposed on nature by the mind to provide organization and meaning (p. 27-29). Thus, neither the categories for "hammers" or "torts" are immutable; they are instead a tool for making sense of the world. Amsterdam and Bruner then apply this analysis to two Supreme Court cases in the second chapter of the pairing. They begin with an "aerial survey" of the categorization used in Missour i v. Jenkins, which struck down a lower court's school desegregation order (p. 54). Included in this survey are the Court's use of the term "interdistrict" to categorize certain...