Join novelist and screenwriter LEA CARPENTER for a talk that has grown out of the class she teaches at Columbia Law School about trying to bring the power of traditional Aristotelian principles of drama to that more practical, worldly, and yet urgent endeavor: the practice of law. Carpenter urges students to learn and lean into tools of traditional narrative structure when it comes to the writing of essential legal documents—those usually dry opening statements, sentencing memos, closing arguments, etc. Calling on material as diverse as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network and even a poem by Billy Collins, and incorporating theories of story from Malcolm Gladwell, Ava DuVernay, and Erroll Morris, Carpenter offers a unique and truly new way to tell legal stories that call on the very oldest way to tell any story: dramatically.

Read more about Lea Carpenter here.