1st Edition
Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary
This book examines how science fiction informs the legal imagination of technological futures.
Science fiction, the contributors to this book argue, is a storehouse of images, tropes, concepts, and memes that inform the legal imagination of the future, and in doing so generate impetus for change. Specifically, the contributors examine how science fictions imagine human life in space, in the digital, and as formed and negotiated by corporations. They then connect this imaginary to how law should be understood in the present and changed for the future. Across the chapters, there is an urgent sense of the need for law – as it is has been, and as it might become – to order and safeguard the future for a multiplicity of vulnerable entities.
This book will appeal to scholars and students with interests in law and technology, legal theory, cultural legal studies and law and the humanities.
1. The legal imaginary and science fiction
Alex Green, Mitchell Travis and Kieran Tranter
Part I: Law of Space(s)
2. Towards an impossible polis: Legal imagination and state continuity
Alex Green
3. Playing Loki? International law, decision-making and inter-temporality through the Marvel multiverse
Kritika Sharma
4. Life on the front line: The lives of child soldiers in Neon Genesis Evangelion
Emily Muir
5. Science fiction and interstellar rights and institutions
Erika Techera, Renae Barker and Meredith Blake
6. International law in outer space: Protecting against ‘evil’ corporate actors
Stacey Henderson and Melissa de Zwart
7. Society is just people, and the law is just their club rules: What utopian science fiction can teach us about legal vulnerability and exploitation in off-world human settlements
Evie Kendal
Part II: Dealing with the Digital
8. Artificial intelligences and legal persons as rule of law subjects in the lifecycle of software objects
Paul Burgess and Daniel Chia Matallana
9. AI Capone, or the criminal masterminds of the future: The imagined possibilities of malevolent artificial intelligence with an emphasis on money laundering
Georgios Pavlidis
10. Analysing the portrayal of AI and the law-making process in science fiction: A comparative study of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Yeliz Figen Döker and Habibe Deniz Seval
11. Science fiction, science and fiction of and for algorithmic agents in law
AM Waltermann
12. Buying and selling the Metaverse: Science fiction speculation, modern technologies and digital data economies
Katie Szilagyi and Christina Fawcett
Part III: We are Borg: Imagining the Corporate Form
13. Political theology, 1001 cars long: Emblems of corporate sovereignty in Netflix’s Snowpiercer
Timothy D Peters and Thomas Giddens
14. The spatio-legality of corporate sovereignty in AppleTV+’s Severance
Dhiraj Nainani
15. Merging AI technology with the corporate form: Purpose, personhood and data in ‘Autofac’
Jordan Aleksander Belor
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.
