NARRATIVE, FICCTION AND CRITICISM IN LEGAL SCIENCE

Abstract

The present proposal takes as a basis for its elaboration the Closing Conference pronounced by the author in the International Private Law Congress held in the city of Punta del Este in the month of October 2013. Its purpose is to show an edge not too much traveled expressly neither in the Doctrine nor in the Jurisprudence of our country. Notwithstanding that the work is inficionado by the sample of a colloquial style, typical of the academic act for which it was thought, it covers aspects of relevance in the discourse of law, such as the possibility of considering it as a narrative field in which the different protagonists of a socio-juridical conflict that intervene in it, add their opposite stories, until the final consummation of the judicial decision by the Judge, also a singular species of narrator subject. The discourse of Law is discovered in this way, full of fictions that are inherent to it, and that in the Latin legal tradition, in a broad sense, have played a particularly important role. The protagonists assume the fiction "as if" it were the truth itself, when in reality, this can be an approved lie or a disguised truth. The crossing of borders between Narrative and Law, which is proposed as a category of specific analysis of legal criticism in the strict sense, shows the role of inventiveness and imagination to modify reality, through narrative legal discourse, as if it was a literary story, thus revealing the performative potential that it has, even more so if it is fictitious, despite the fact that many times it is intended to deny or at least dissimilate.