Telling stories about cases and clients: The ethics of narrative

Unlike its counterparts, clinic theory explores the pedagogy of lawyering. Clinic theory explores the boundaries between teachers and students in representing clients and sets out various models for experiential learning about clients. In their writing, clinical theorists draw on their experience representing clients and teaching law students about the art of representing clients in a law school clinic setting. Many authors who embrace critical or client-centered lawyering are clinical teachers or former clinical teachers, and most clinical teachers identify with one or more of.these schools of thought.

While these schools of thought differ in some significant respects, the lines separating them are far from clear.117 At bottom, however, these theories share in common the idea that cases belong to clients, not to lawyers, and posit that clients should have a role in determining how they are represented. They recognize the fundamental importance of client life experience and strategic skills in legal representation. They urge lawyers to tell stories about clients in their cases, and for clients to tell those stories themselves.

To support their theories about representation, advocacy, and the relationship between clients and their lawyers, law professor story writers tell client stories. Tony Alfieri draws from Josephine V.'s example of "speaking out of turn" at a hearing to illustrate how his client resisted her lawyer's and the administrative law judge's efforts to suppress her experience and her voice."8 Adding client stories to the mix provides a way to recast the ethics of advocacy"' 19 and to enhance our understanding of legal doctrine. 120 Like other outsider stories, client stories point out gaps in the law and undo the erasure of experience.121 Stories about the clients and the impact of the welfare system are lively and engaging. They provide a real picture of the impact of doctrine, lawyering styles, and complex administrative hearing systems on the lives of poor people. Through stories, readers have a better chance of locating themselves in an article and thus a better chance of understanding and evaluating its thesis. While the collaborative theorists do not emphasize this point, articles about lawyering can be drab and dull without stories about the people affected.

The power of stories is evident in comparing articles about legal service practice and clinical programs published in the 1970s, which are distant and detached, to those published since storytelling took hold. For example, in an article published in 1971, Lawrence Sullivan argued that specially trained lawyers and legal services were necessary to address the specific needs of poor clients. 122 Sullivan makes the important point that poverty lawyers too often squeeze their clients' problems into solutions that fail to serve the real needs of those clients. 123 Although this valuable point is the same one made two decades later by Tony Alfieri and others, by today's standards the Sullivan piece would not stand a chance against the more colorful, contextual writing of these authors. 124 The absence of stories in his discussion of the role of the Housing and Economic Development Law Project in the then-new and innovative field of poverty law is devastating.