Law and Literature share a logic of expansion: unanticipated ‘crimes’ (and laws) and new literary genres. In Hobbes Leviathan the private individual voice was surrendered to the Law of the Creator (or ruler) to create a commonweal. The repetitioned recovery—resulting in a ‘re-covery’ of this suspended voice of legal intention—has grounded originalism and the privileging of precedence in western legal history. The historical re-emergence of a repressed, conceiving voice becomes a rival, metaphoric appellate division of the law: the voice(s) of public opinion. In three foundational novelists from three countries, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Anthony Trollope, and Bernard Schlink, a dialectic involving prescribed law and emergent, un-inscribable voices of those caught up in it, evokes the return of the singular voice as an ‘Imaginary’ collectivity.