The role of narratives in legal contexts has been explored in multidisciplinary research for
several decades. A common claim in this research is that the understanding of narratives is
crucial to the understanding of any legal process especially to most representations of the
facts in a criminal case. It seems justified to say that law's cultural foundations and
presuppositions are always in some way or another manifested in its narratives and acts of
narration. The research conducted within the field of law and narrative helps to expand our
knowledge of the multiple ways in which legal thinking and decision-making rely on narrative
in both senses of the term. It also enhances our understanding of how narratives are put to use
as rhetorical tools both in the courtroom and in the court's written judgments. The
contributions to this volume present the field of law and narrative as it exists today and
expand the area of inquest into fields like text linguistics speech act theories ordinary
language theory public international law artificial intelligence and various media
transformations of law stories.
