Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. In this normative world, law and narrative are inseparably related. Every prescription is insistent in its demand to be located in discourse – to be supplied with history and destiny, beginning and end, explanation and purpose … The codes that relate our normative system to our social constructions of reality and to our visions of what the world might be are narrative. The very imposition of a normative force upon a state of affairs, real or imagined, is the act of creating narrative … Narratives are models through which we experience and study transformations that result when a given simplified state of affairs is made to pass through the force field of a similarly simplified set of norms.14
Cover also noted how legal narrative frequently emerges against a backdrop of violence: “[T]he jurisgenerative principle by which legal meaning proliferates in all communities never exists in isolation from violence.”15
Despite Cover's contribution, scholarly attention to law and framing has remained relatively sparse but has regained momentum in the recent past. Marshall (2003), for example, described the interplay between the everyday lives of “ordinary people” and the law as giving rise to “legal consciousness:”
To ordinary people, law is not simply the official texts of judicial opinions and legislative acts that embody formal legal rules, nor is it just the formal legal institutions of courts, lawyers and police. Instead, the law of everyday life – what Ewick and Silbey call “legality” – embraces “the meanings, sources of authority, and cultural practices that are commonly recognized as legal, regardless of who employs them or for what ends. In this rendering, people may invoke and enact legality in ways neither approved nor acknowledged by law.” Thus, individuals’ lives are not simply constrained by legality. In fact, in their choices and social practices, people also create their own sets of legal meanings. This interactive process between meaning and practice is legal consciousness.16
Leachman (2013) built on Marshall's work, noting “[l]egal concepts are words, labels or categories associated with the law, which people use to interpret everyday life. Through legal framing, social movement actors strategically link together these legal concepts (and nonlegal ones) to convince others to support their cause.”17
More recently, Muller and Slominski (2019) focused on law as a “master frame,”18 urging more focus on “the particularities of the legal discourse itself” and how “norms entrepreneurs develop legal arguments to achieve political objectives.”19 Muller and Slominski, thus, posit three variations of legal framing: diagnostic legal framing, prognostic legal framing, and motivational legal framing.20
Diagnostic legal framing, according to Muller and Slominski, “communicates that a particular issue needs to be considered within the master frame of the law, as opposed to treating it primarily as a political, economic or moral issue.” Prognostic legal framing involves “suggesting specific remedies to the diagnosed legal problems.” Motivational legal framing “provides a ‘call to arms’ to generate mobilization” among policymakers.21
Muller and Slominksi applied their legal framing construct to public policy debates in the European Union, describing how “the interaction of legally savvy frame entrepreneurs with the law-thick world of EU politics has generated a distinct ‘legal’ discourse, which has gradually shaped political deliberations both within the EU and beyond.”22
Muller and Slominski also cautioned that legal frame entrepreneurship requires certain attributes for success:
At the same time, we identify two scope conditions for effective legal framing. First, legal framing benefits from the ability of applying law to facts. This requires frame entrepreneurs that have intimate knowledge about procedures, sequences of decision-making, and policy matters that revolve around crucial legal issues. Second, we argue that legal claims by frame entrepreneurs that are in accordance with established legal meanings are more persuasive and more difficult to ignore than those which operate in areas of legal contestation or produce new legal arguments.23