ABSTRACT
In liberal thought, law and the legal subject have often been imagined as mirror images of each other – both are sovereign, self-determining, self-contained, and self-possessed. This chapter presents a discussion of internal and external in law construction. It then illustrates some of the ways in which subjective imaginings and experiences are formative of law, with a little more emphasis on how consciousness and imagination are externalised through narrative and performance. The perspective of the legal theorist – very often but not always including the critical legal theorist – is that of the person educated in a law school with its extremely restricted understanding of law. Legal theory, and in particular positivist legal theory, has consolidated and reinforced the limited idea of law through an almost unbreakable alliance of abstracted expert understandings of law with highly exclusionary philosophical and pedagogical perspectives.
