We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Order (for free) in the court: Legal systems as sites for creating emergent order out of agents' narratives.
- Authors
Smith, Doug
- Abstract
The practice of law is nothing less than the receiving and re-telling of stories in anticipation of others' undermining those stories in their own re-tellings of counter-stories. The ordered regime we perceive as law is the result of constraints on storytelling in the contexts of the legal system, a system in which the storytellers reduce uncertainty by telling a narrow range of stories in institutionally constrained ways. Complexity analysis suggests that legal actors, institutions and artifacts interacting through this process of storytelling on a particular scale, and doing so according to relatively simple heuristics, collectively create order at higher scales. Complexity provides a narrative map for understanding the contexts of legal storytelling, and thus a way to confront complexity and to effect change.
- Publication
Emergence: Complexity & Organization, 2005, Vol 7, Issue 3/4, p53
- ISSN
1521-3250
- Publication type
Academic Journal