Law Matters: A Conversation With Professor Michael A. Perino

For the next installment of our Law Matters story series, Dean Jelani Jefferson Exum talks to Mike Perino, the Law School’s Dean George W. Matheson Professor of Law, about his innovative seminar, Legal Storytelling. Professor Perino is the author of The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (Penguin Press 2010). In his recent bestseller, 1929, Andrew Ross Sorkin called Hellhound smart, stylish, and “essential” for understanding the Great Crash and its aftermath.

JJE: What inspired you to create and teach Legal Storytelling, and what principles guided you as you designed the course?

MP: For years, I thought about teaching a class like Law and Literature, but instead of novels, students would read nonfiction narratives about legal issues. Through those accounts, they would learn how the law is shaped, not just by precedents and stare decisis, but by demographic shifts, social movements, and changing societal norms and values. My plan evolved after I spent two years teaching our first-year Legal Writing course, which focuses on the basics of legal analysis and the standard structure of legal argumentation. Writing a good story is a skill— but, unfortunately, one that gets relatively short shrift in the traditional Legal Writing curriculum. So, I put those two ideas together and designed a seminar where students learn how a skilled writer crafts a compelling piece of creative nonfiction and where they can try their hands at telling a true story.

JJE: The course is grounded in the observation that “lawyers are storytellers.” Why is the ability to craft a compelling narrative such an essential lawyering skill?

MP: Human beings understand the world through stories, and that’s just as true in law as it is everywhere else. Especially in litigation, a lawyer’s task is to construct a compelling narrative out of a jumble of factual detail. But the lawyer’s skill isn’t just selecting and organizing the legally significant facts. It’s weaving those facts together with the relevant substantive and procedural law to convince the court that their client is entitled to what they’re asking for. 

JJE: The course readings include Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills and your own The Hellhound of Wall Street. What do these works reveal about how effective legal stories are constructed?

MP: The best stories aren’t just dramatic. They have an overarching theme that reveals something about human nature or the way the world works. Malcolm’s book examines a notorious murder trial in Queens. Hellhound tells the story of Ferdinand Pecora, who led the Senate investigation into Wall Street after the 1929 stock market crash. They’re both dramatic. But what makes them perfect for this seminar is that they’re about lawyers as storytellers. Malcolm’s central theme is that a trial is a contest between competing narratives in which the best story wins. Pecora couldn’t just present dry financial statistics; he had to weave them into a morality tale that would crystalize unfocused anger at Wall Street into the kind of political moment in which needed reform could occur. 

JJE: Students gather and synthesize primary and secondary sources for the seminar’s capstone storytelling project. Why is that important?

MP: What amazed me when I set out to research Hellhound was how much it felt like what I had done in practice as a big-firm litigator. Whether I was reading hearing transcripts or turning pages in the archives, I was collecting little bits of information and trying to see how they all fit together. It was no different from what I had done in practice, sifting out the irrelevant, adding the needed context, and arranging everything into a story that was compelling and that made sense. So, I see the students’ work locating relevant source materials and constructing them into a captivating but accurate story as a unique opportunity to build those same lawyering skills.

JJE: What storytelling skills or insights do you hope your Legal Storytelling students will carry with them into their legal careers?

Writing is about choices. What facts should I include and what should I omit? What’s the best way to structure my story? The question I always ask my students to ask themselves is: What does my reader need to know and when do they need to know it? The point is that there is no single right way to tell any story, but we need to be thoughtful and deliberate in why we’re choosing to tell a story one way versus another. And I want them to appreciate how much they need to edit to get whatever they are working on right. Their job is a make life easy for their reader, and as has so often been said, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”