Abstract
This Essay will not review the wisdom of poverty lawyer tactics and strategies in a specific case. For my purpose, it is sufficient to observe that the tactics and strategies applied satisfied the twin objectives of safeguarding the client’s entitlement to food stamps and invalidating federal regulations abrogating that entitlement. The Essay focuses instead on the discursive and interpretive methods of lawyering, specifically the notion of poverty law advocacy as a medium of storytelling.
I begin the Essay with Mrs. Celeste's telling of her story because of my abiding suspicion towards the poverty lawyer's, and therefore my own, method of storytelling. My suspicion is that a lawyer's telling of a client's story in advocacy falsifies the normative content of that story. The normative content of a client's story consists of substantive narratives which construct the meanings and images of the client's social world. Both the lawyer and the client speak in narratives. Lawyer storytelling falsifies client story when lawyer narratives silence and displace client narratives.