GCSC KNL | Prof. Dr. Ralph Grunewald: This is Not Storytime: The Narrative Construction of Guilt and Innocence in Wrongful Conviction Cases

Wrongful convictions—cases in which an innocent person is convicted of a crime they did not commit—have been studied primarily through the lenses of law, psychology, and the social sciences. Despite a large body of scholarship, a very simple question has not been answered: How is it possible that prosecutors can convince juries and themselves of the guilt of an innocent defendant, often even against strong exculpatory evidence? In his book, “Narratives of Guilt and Innocence” (NYU Press 2023) Ralph Grunewald addresses this crucial question by analyzing the power of narrative and how it influences the construction of legal reality and the evidence for it. Wrongful convictions exemplify the uncomfortable relationship between narrative and truth in law, and they also provide insights into how differently legal cultures narrate truth in law. Grunewald will discuss the effects of different cultural narrative blueprints (the American and German) and how our narrative desire as a human trait has a universal power with a persistence that transcends the regulatory and procedural setup of a given system.

// Prof. Dr. Ralph Grunewald (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is an associate professor in the Department of English and the Legal Studies Program. He studies the relationship between law and the humanities and literature in particular. Ralph received his law degree from the University of Mainz and the State of Bavaria, Germany, a Ph.D. in Criminal Law and Criminology from the University of Mainz (2002, summa cum laude) and a Master’s Degree (LL.M.) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School (2005). He has taught at German law schools but also practiced law at a law firm specializing on white collar and corporate crime defense work. At UW-Madison, Ralph teaches classes on American criminal justice, juvenile justice, comparative criminal justice, and law and literature. His publications include a monograph on the principle of education in in the German Juvenile Court Act and various articles on questions of criminal law and legal narratology. He is currently working on comparative problems of wrongful convictions and on a larger project in which he assesses the legal and literary construction of guilt.

Ralph is a member of the UW-Madison Teaching Academy and a Bradley Learning Community Faculty Fellow. He has been selected to receive the William H. Kiekhofer Teaching Award.

To join the Keynote Lecture online, please refer to the GGK/GCSC KNL Announcement (sent per e-mail to the newsletter subscribers) or contact Dr. Jens Kugele. (The meeting is accessible shortly before 18:00.)