The paradox of pluralism

‘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