The Shaping and Misshaping of Identity through Legal Practice and Process: (Re)discovering Mr Kernott

The focus of this paper is the construction of identity within the context of English legal practice and process. Its subject matter is the protracted civil litigation that extended from a brief County Court hearing in 2007 to the Supreme C ourt judgment of Jones v Kernott [2011] UKSC 53 . Taking as its theoretical basis recent work by Hilde Lindemann, Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal identities (Oxford University Press, 2014) the author analyses the reported judgments of the appellate courts , as well as a recently recorded first hand narrative account of Mr Kernott , as a means to examining how far long - established legal practices and customs can operate to construct, hold and let go of personal identity .