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What are the current status and future prospects of confession, in the law and in cultural practices? Recent Supreme Court decisions in Missouri v. Seibert and United States v. Patane raise new questions about Miranda doctrine that one thought had been laid to rest in Dickerson v. United States, in 2000. Seibert revives Oregon v. Elstad, and its worries about endowing psychological issues with constitutional significance—and this may be something of a key to the Court's uncertainties as to what kind of reading it wants to give to Miranda. In general, the place of confession in the law remains troubled and uncertain, all the more so in that the law, like the culture at large, seems addicted to confessions.

I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller - to find out how they are. So they're dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there's nothing to photograph… And when the sitting is over … there's nothing left except the photograph and a kind of embarrassment.

"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern

The law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically.This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality?Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.ContributorsJ. M. BalkinPeter BrooksHarlon L. DaltonAlan M. DershowitzDaniel A. FarberRobert A. FergusonPaul GewirtzJohn HollanderAnthony KronmanPierre N. LevalSanford LevinsonCatharine MacKinnonJanet MalcolmMartha MinowDavid N. RosenElaine ScarryLouis Michael SeidmanSuzanna SherryReva B. SiegelRobert Weisberg