1st Edition
Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction
This book presents and engages the world building capacity of legal theory through cultural legal studies of science and speculative fictions.
In these studies, the contributors take seriously the legal world building of science and speculative fiction to reveal, animate and critique legal wisdom: juris-prudence. Following a common approach in cultural legal studies, the contributors engage directly, and in detail, with specific cultural ‘texts’, novels, television, films, and video games in order to explore a range of possible legal futures. The book is organized in three sections: first, the contextualisation of science and speculative fiction as jurisprudence; second, the temporality of law and legal theory; and third, the analysis of specific science and speculative fictions. Throughout, the contributors reveal the way in which law as nomos builds normative universes through the narration of a future.
This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in legal theory, cultural legal studies, law and the humanities, and law and literature.
1. The collapse and the spiral: Law, culture and science fiction
Alex Green, Mitchell Travis and Kieran Tranter
Part I: Foundation
2. The magnitudes of law and science fiction
Kieran Tranter
Part II: The high castle – science fiction as legal theory
3. Dystopian jurisprudence
Mitchell Travis
4. Black/African science fiction and imaginative resistance: explorations towards a racially just jurisprudence of the future
5. There is no ‘I’ in law: The past and future of legal authority and subjects
Chris Dent
6. The three-body problem: Prometheus, Pandora, and the cosmic jurisprudence
Moira McMillan
7. Law, sovereignty and its subversions in Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword and Ancillary Mercy
Daniel Hourigan
8. Experimenting in legal dystopia: Conceptualising and interrogating socio-legal and jurisprudential problems in science fiction video games
Craig John Newbery-Jones
9. Sir Samuel Griffith and utopia: Characterising the politician
Karen Schultz
Part III: The shadow proclamation – fevered legality in sci-fi franchises
10. ‘The circle must be broken’: Imagining legal monsterhood through Doctor Who
Steven S Kapica
11. No way out: The liberal fantasy of rebellion in Andor
Isaac Henry
12. Boldly gone: The estranged presence of law in Star Trek
Kieran Tranter
Part IV: Others
13. Ex silico: Fictions, predictions and personhoods in film and law
Bruce Baer Arnold
14. Ectogestation as emancipation: A feminist science fiction
Zoe L Tongue
15. Dreaming of electric sheep: Android lessons for nature
Felicity Deane
Biography
Alex Green is Lecturer in Law at the University of York, UK
Mitchell Travis is Director of the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds, UK.
Kieran Tranter is Chair of Law, Technology and Future at the School of Law, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
