Harsh Nassa, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, School of Law, Bengaluru
“Writing judgments is an art, not a science”.
~ Lord Hope of Craighead
INTRODUCTION
1. LITERATURE IN LAW
Legal judgments can be called as plethora of sources, it may be, history, social sciences economics or literature. Judgments contain elements of storytelling and are generally rhetorical. The usage of literature is to actually meet certain objectives such as making facts more understandable, to generate empathy, to support legal reasoning or to provide meanings to words.
Judgments are a difficult genre of writing to get into, in the sense, they may confuse, puzzle, punish, enforce or entertain people. Technically, for the judgements to be understood, followed and respected, they needed to be a good story using imagery, allusions and metaphors. For these reasons, Judges frequently cite Shakespearean stories, famous literary lines, morally significant writing, poetry, couplets and make it look or sound in such a way as it were a literary piece.
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