Professor Berger was one of the featured speakers at the Narrative and Metaphor in the Law Symposium hosted by Stanford Law School January 30. The symposium, organized by Michael Hanne of the University of Auckland and Robert Weisberg of Stanford, brought together scholars who have contributed to the study of narrative or metaphor and the law, and sometimes the two in combination, for a series of conversations to explore those interactions. Scholars from the many different dimensions of legal research were joined by speakers from anthropology, cognitive psychology, creative writing, the media and public policy, in an effort to elaborate a fuller account than has previously been attempted of the intricate relations that operate at the nexus between narrative and metaphor in the law.
This symposium is the third of a series on the role of narrative and metaphor in different disciplines. The first, relating to medicine, was held at UC Berkeley in 2010 and generated a special issue of the journal Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 44 (3), Fall 2011, entitled “Binocular Vision: Narrative and Metaphor in Medicine.” The second, relating to politics, was held at Claremont Graduate University in 2012 and generated a book entitled Warring with Words: Narrative and Metaphor in Politics (Psychology Press, 2014). The Stanford symposium relating to the law will generate a book to be published by Cambridge University Press.
More information about the symposium can be found here.
