Polyphony and truth in legal narratives

Abstract

The article is inserted in theresearch field of Law and Literature, morespecifically in the scope denominated Lawas Literature. It approaches the judicial processand, highlighting its polyphonic and narrativeaspects, aims at demonstrating the pertinence ofincorporating the notions of narrative coherenceand verisimilitude to decision theory. To do so,it uses the Bakhtinian concept of polyphony,which comes from literary and linguisticstudies, by examining the dialogic nature oflanguage and characterizing the polyphonicdiscourse; then, it highlights the narrativityand the polyphony of the judicial process; and,finally, to illustrate the theoretical conclusionsreached, the paper problematizes the conceptionof truth postulated by Michele Taruffo,opposing it to the idea that a judicial decisionconstitutes a piece of fiction assumed to be true.