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.