When the Law Can’t See You: Writing a Compelling Inter-Sectional Narrative for the Court

The law promises equal justice, yet its grammar remains stubbornly monocular. When a Black woman stands before a judge, is she seen as Black? As a woman? Or is she – like the plaintiffs Kimberle Crenshaw first wrote about in 1989 – visible only as one or the other, and never both at once?¹

Courts often operate within what critical race theorists call a “majoritarian” mindset composed of a bundle of presuppositions that render certain identities and experiences invisible.² In this climate, intersectional narrative advocacy is not merely a rhetorical flourish but a constitutional necessity. When the law cannot see you, you must teach it how to look.

The Invisibility Problem

Invisibility is not just a subtle side effect of the majoritarian mindset. To litigants, invisibility can give them adverse outcomes, inappropriate remedies, and compounded trauma. For the court and the law itself, it can lead to erroneous fact-finding, incomplete records, unjust verdicts, doctrinal stagnation, and legitimacy deficits.³

A 2025 UK study of immigration judges reveals something counter-intuitive: minority women judges are likelier than any other group to rule against immigrants. Why? Stereotype-avoidance. One South Asian immigration judge testified: "I felt terribly self-conscious, on guard, needing to make sure I was right and also be seen to be doing it 'properly'. So I may even have been harsher than white judges".⁴

The lesson? Even those who share intersectional identities may suppress them under institutional pressure. If judges cannot bring their full selves to the bench, litigants cannot rely on courts to see the full selves before them. Narrative advocacy is the bridge.

A Guide for the Practitioner

The "composite counterstory" methodology, demonstrated in recent CRT scholarship, weaves together "data, existing literature, and the experiences of people of color to construct a narrative that challenges majoritarian stories"⁵. As Delgado (1989) described, counter-storytelling disrupts the dominant group's "shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural".⁶

Here are four principles for the courtroom narrative:

1. Situate, don't isolate. The client's story is not an aberration. It is part of a network of systemic patterns. The court must see both the individual and the architecture.⁷

2. Name the categories, then trouble them. Explicitly name race, gender, class, disability, immigration status – but show how their convergence produces something irreducible to any single term. As intersectionality theorists emphasize, "their intersection produce domination and subordination" in ways that single-axis analysis misses.⁸

3. Use the law's own tools against its blind spots. Social framework evidence, legislative history documenting intersectional harms, and international human rights law can supplement domestic doctrine. The genealogical camp of CRT offers tools of "reversal, marginality, discontinuity, materiality, and specificity" to reveal hidden biases.⁹

4. Attend to silence. Silence in the record shows what was not asked, what was not said, and what the client learned not to say. This is itself evidence.¹⁰

The goal is not legibility to power on power's own terms. The goal is to change what counts as legible.¹¹ The court cannot see you until it learns to look.

Puja Patel

Third Year Law Student

References

1. Möschel, M. (2019). "Critical race theory." In Christodoulidis, E., Dukes, R. and Goldoni, M. (eds), Research Handbook on Critical Legal Theory. Edward Elgar Publishing, 63-78.

2. Delgado R and Stefancic J, 'Critical Race Theory: An Annotated Bibliography' (1993) 79(2) Virginia Law Review 461

3. Sommerlad H, 'The implementation of quality initiatives and the judicial construction of the judicial persona' (2013) 20(3) International Journal of the Legal Profession 351

4. Ibid.

5. Jayakumar UM, 'The mourning after affirmative action: a composite counterstory about whiteness as property, fugitive pedagogy, and possibility' (2024) 43(3) Equality, Diversity and Inclusion 425

6. Delgado R, 'Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative' (1989) 87(8) Michigan Law Review 2411

7. Supra note 5.

8. Supra note 1.

9. Supra note 1.

10. Supra note 6.

11. Supra note 6.