Stories of law shape institutionalized systems of biopolitics and reenforce hegemonic power relations. We must shape our subjectivities by embracing the transformative process of questioning constitutive practices of law. The law is a place of political engagement shaped by the questions we ask and the resistance to the biopolitical motives that undergird our institutions. We must reject attempts at maintain the hegemonic culture through law and policy and resist through the transformative process of contestation/critique.

In this chapter I suggest that stories have significant power in legal education for helping students to do just that—to develop critical awareness, be self-reflective and construct identity. I argue that not only do first year law students deploy stories to understand the world of law, but that they also use stories as a form of self reflection, and as a way of challenging their own (and others’) perspectives on the social world. Legal educators have a privilege and responsibility to harness and explore these perspectives with the students as they actively deploy stories towards their developing identity construction.

My aim in this chapter is to commend a legal pedagogy that appreciates the unique position of law students by harnessing their capacity for biopolitically reflective and critical analysis. As such, the chapter first urges for the recognition that developing biopolitical awareness as an indispensable aspect of a student’s identity construction within law school. Having demonstrated that law schools are in a unique place to catalyse biopolitical awareness, the chapter next considers stories and conversation as a critical aspect to the student experience of transformation. In the final section, the article seeks to commend possibilities for capitalising on the process of student identity towards biopolitical engagement.

The Role of Law School in Encouraging Biopolitical Awareness The specific local culture we inhabit will inform and challenge our interaction with other parts of the wider culture. The complexity of a law school education is no exception, as it invites the construction of legal identity by reflecting a pattern of integrated practices and shared meaning-making processes through common speech, symbols, and practices. As its own discursive community, the law school is a locus for the struggle over meaning where students are reflexively involved with a continuous biographical project of identity—attempting to answer critical questions of how to act, what to do, and who to be.3 This is important for developing and nurturing critical reflection and biopolitical awareness in students, a pursuit that is increasingly being encouraged within contemporary educational discourse.4

Interestingly, while many studies in the discipline of law are no stranger to biopolitical considerations, legal education still seems to place little explicit emphasis on biopolitical engagement or awareness as a key learning objective in the mainstream doctrinal curriculum. Unsurprisingly, the hegemony of the ‘black letter’ tradition, and the ‘analytic focus of legal education’5 which depend on an identified and applied body of self-referential rules, has long resisted a contextual or critical approach to the law.6 Yet, the rising prominence of cultural legal studies, with its directed attention on the cultural forces implicated in meaning-making about law, has increasingly challenged traditional accounts of law to better understand the various ways in which law can be perceived, critiqued, and understood.7 Teaching students to develop biopolitical awareness as part of identity construction could therefore comprise a more central concern of educational objectives. It is argued that there is much scope for legal education to open the door to pedagogical practice that sees students empowered to (rather than inhibited from) exploring and constructing biopolitical awareness and identity construction.

Explicitly embracing the law student’s transformative process of ‘becoming’8 thus requires a recognition that legal education is implicated in the construction of biopolitical subjectivities. It also means acknowledging the historical influences of biopower in the constitutive practices of law, including those of legal education. ‘Biopower’, as conceived by Foucault to be a distinctive form of political rationality, refers to the application and impact of political power on human beings as a species, rather than a focus on the individual.9 The concept of biopolitics advanced in this chapter invokes this Foucauldian analysis of neoliberal governmentality—namely, that the governance of human life should be understood as institutionally legitimised and regulated through the political technology of biopower.10 At its core, biopolitics is about ‘securing normality and the order of the polis’11 through technologies of control, surveillance, and governance. As such, ‘the law’ as both institution and practice has a distinct role in normalising (and legitimising) power and truth relations. With its traditions of objectivity and autonomy, the law can be seen as a mechanism for maintaining the hegemonic cultural values and interests within society or, at the very least, as an accessible arena in which to observe how these interests are maintained, challenged, and altered. Through the operation of biopolitical discourse in social practice, legal education is equally implicated in this exercise. It is argued that law school constructs, defines, and circulates the objects of knowledge about law by regulating which meanings can or cannot be deployed. Both the learning and practice of law is demarcated early in legal education as occupying a special place of responsibility in society, and the institution of law school often ensures that ‘[e]ntrance into this interpretive community is premised on the mastery’ of a certain type of legal language.12 By disciplining ways of ‘speaking’ and behaviour through forms of ‘knowledge’ associated with a specified activity or institution,13 biopolitical discourse is so easily perpetuated and reinforced within the law.14 This is equally so for educative practices which participate in the production of knowledge, and seeks to legitimise the links between the construction and reproduction of ‘truths’ with the maintenance of power. Since law schools often frame and employ this legal knowledge for the purposes of producing graduates who can ‘think like a lawyer’,15 a legal education then, is itself, an exercise of biopower that ‘(re)produces and regulates the economic subject’.16 As Wittman has deftly observed, a critical component to the success of biopolitics is that a variety of institutions ‘operate together as a system of coercion rather than force’ such that ‘people can become so entrenched in institutional logics that those logics and the institutions that support them become invisible’.17 I want to argue that law school, and its pedagogy, can (and should) operate to make visible these institutional logics, and to interrupt the process of biopower, as part of a law student’s transformative process of ‘becoming’. That is, the teaching environment in law school should be viewed as an important place where power, and the meanings that uphold power, can be discussed, challenged, or resisted. A place where educative practices demand diversity in theoretical interactions with the political, social, and cultural contexts of law; and where possibilities and opportunities are created for unpredictable and diverse outcomes.

In this way, law school can (and should) be viewed as a site where competing discourses are juxtaposed or played against one another, and as one of the key locations in which student legal identity can be negotiated, developed, and constructed to include biopolitical engagement and awareness. Helping students to develop biopolitical awareness as part of their identity construction is a positive step towards encouraging self-evaluation and the challenging of world-view orthodoxies.