‘Telling stories of all kinds is the major way that human beings have endeavoured to make
sense of themselves and their social world’.1 Law is all about stories: stories of individual
cases; stories of the development of doctrines of law over time; stories about ‘the law’; and
stories about legal ideas and practices. Legislators, adjudicators, advocates, and scholars are
constantly telling, accepting, and perpetuating stories; what Carole Pateman has termed
‘conjectural histories’. Orthodox accounts and their implicit assumptions are perpetuated
without question. The fact that they are authored and constructed is too easily forgotten.
The ways in which these stories are framed; the assumptions, their biases and the fact that
they are the product of human systems are overlooked. These stories of law can easily
become constraining, rendering invisible alternative narratives and experiences. As Pateman’s
work illustrates, the stories that do not fit the narrative are silenced and forgotten.2
Legal disputes naturally narrow the focus to the often technical issues at hand. The technicolor
lives of those involved are reduced to the monochrome constructs that the legal system can
understand. The legal eye focuses on constructing a problem and solving a problem. Although
cases may be cited by reference to the surnames of the parties, those people are depersonalized in
the judgments. Legal argumentation silences or at least suppresses their voices.