Making the Case: The Art of the Judicial Opinion

Paul W. Kahn, the Robert W. Winner Professor of Law and the Humanities and director of the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights

(Yale University Press)

In this book, Paul Kahn speaks simultaneously to students and scholars. Drawing on 30 years of teaching experience, he introduces students to the deep, narrative structure of the judicial opinion. Learning to read the opinion, the student will learn the nature of legal argument. Kahn’s exposition of the opinion simultaneously offers a theory of legal meaning that will be of interest to scholars of law, humanities, and the social sciences. At the center of Kahn’s approach are ideas of narrative, persuasion, and self-government. His account of interpretation in law offers innovative views of the nature of authorship, the development and decline of doctrine, and the construction of facts.