1. INTRODUCTION

This chapter is about the way in which conceptions of truth and reality are articulated and contained in family law, specifically in contexts in which the meaning of knowing comes into question. It explores the idea that there can, and could be, a space between conceptions of truth and reality, and that family law might need to articulate an account of what this means and entails. The question is inspired by what is, to my mind, one of the most provocative and interesting lines in John Eekelaar’s book, Family Law and Personal Life : the line that ‘in general it is better to confront the world as we have made it than pretend it is otherwise’. The normative dimension and practical implications of this claim have generated much debate in the literature. What I would like to consider here, however, is what it would mean to inhabit the spaces that are implied in this statement. What would it mean to ‘confront the world as we have made it’, to ‘pretend it is otherwise’, or to be somewhere in-between? What would it mean to know, in these spaces?

The context in which the line in question arises in Eekelaar’s book is one of an analysis of the way in which ‘physical truth’ (meaning ‘what is or was the case regarding physical events and actions’) has, at times, been concealed in family law, as where a child’s paternity is concealed by way of ‘the legal truths generated by [birth] registration or presumptions’. Eekelaar’s argument is twofold. It is firstly, and in relation to children, an argument about justice: that children’s interests ‘in knowing the physical truth’ outweigh those of adults, ‘because for children they give rise to claims in justice, whereas for adults they form the basis for attempts at exercising power’.