ABSTRACT
I am interested in the constitution of legal subjects: the ongoing process by which a multiplicity of contributions, including law(s), legal language, or legal discourse, if you will, actually constitute social, material and legal subjects and relations. In particular, I am interested in the changing nature and contestability of those subjects. Often, in work of this kind, the legal discourse examined consists of legislative and judicial pronouncements which are said to play an important part in constituting the subjects who come to law and are not merely demonstrations of law regulating those subjects.2 Importantly, the participation of the subject, him or herself, is also a crucial part of the process, so that, in child and family law, for example, the process of legal ‘meaning making’ is the constant negotiation and renegotiation of judicial utterances, legal arguments and interpretations of the parties’ ‘stories’, which result in the mother, father or child, of English law:
It is from this theoretical perspective that I am interested in law’s contribution to meaning making and the degree to which it facilitates, or inhibits, the agency of the subject in the process. At this juncture, however, I am interested in the contribution of a different part of legal discourse: that ‘law’ created at the advice giving stage, during which the solicitor-client relationship is negotiated, and after which the client-litigant-legal subject emerges, either to engage with formal law in the courts or to be diverted from it to alternative forms of dispute resolution. During this ‘subjectification’ process, the agency of the client-subject is negotiated with the solicitor and each brings to those negotiations feelings, perceptions and other information from a range of discourses.
