Book Launch for ‘Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction’ and ‘Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary’

Join Mitchell Travis and Alex Green for the launch of their two new edited collections.

About this Event

This autumn sees the release of two edited collections published with Routledge: ‘Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction’  and ‘Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary’. These books present and engage the world building capacity of legal theory through cultural legal studies of science and speculative fictions. These books have been edited by Mitchell Travis (University of Leeds), Alex Green (University of York), and Kieran Tranter (Queensland University of Technology).

In these studies, the 34 contributors drawn from around the world take seriously the legal world building of science and speculative fiction to reveal, animate, and critique legal wisdom: jurisprudence. 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.

This event showcases these important contributions to the field bringing together some of the key contributors to the collection to present at the School of Law. It continues the School of Laws’ commitment to being an exciting and future-orientated home for research.

These two volumes form an important intervention into law’s engagement with and construction of just futures and build upon the Centre for Law and Social Justice’s core theme of ‘Defining, Accessing and Enacting Justice’ by considering the imaginative elements involved in the conceptualisation of justice.

The event consists of two panels with each speaker talking for around 20 minutes with half an hour for questions. Travis and Green will also give an opening address lasting around 20-30 minutes.

How to Attend 

Please sign up in advance here.

Timetable

Welcome and Introduction

1-1.30pm

Mitchell Travis (University of Leeds) and Alex Green (University of York)

Panel I: States of the Legal Imaginary

1.30-3pm

Dystopian Jurisprudence

Mitchell Travis (University of Leeds)

This paper outlines the developing field of dystopian jurisprudence. It highlights some of the predominant foci of dystopian fiction – namely, social degeneration, technology and climate disaster. The paper then traces how dystopias have been understood and employed within legal scholarship highlighting the superficiality and theoretical ‘thinness’ that has characterised the field to date. The paper then engages with a number of emerging exemplars, primarily arising in the discipline of law and literature. This is followed by the tracing of dystopias within the jurisprudential imagination primarily engaging with the theoretical work of Hobbes and his contribution to the justification of the Euro-modern State. Whilst Hobbes is not well known for his contribution to international law, his work on the importance and role of the state as the sole arbiter of justice has had a significant bearing on the project of colonialism – and its characterisation of non-statist systems as ‘dystopic’. In doing so, the colonial project frames indigenous communities as dystopic whilst simultaneously enacting dystopias onto those communities. As a consequence, experiences of indigenous and postcolonial exemplify the nature and timeliness of dystopia and law’s contribution to and perpetuation of dystopic conditions. The paper closes by outlining the utility of dystopian literature to law acting as both a warning and a mirror. By taking these seriously, we may be able to forge new futures that mitigate the type of dystopia that we inhabit.

Towards an impossible polis: Legal imagination and state continuity

Alex Green (University of York)

China Miéville’s The City & The City is set in Besźel and Ul Qoma, two fictional cities that exist within the same physical space. Citizens of both states are legally bound to ‘unsee’ any buildings, infrastructure and individuals belonging to the ‘other’ city. Analogously – or so I claim – international law also ‘unsees’ political communities that do not conform to its received conceptions of statehood. The result of this real-life unseeing is not coexistence but subordination and neglect. Moreover, even established states can be divested of their status in unjust ways. The threats faced by Small Island Developing States (SIDS) due to climate change provide a recent example. Rising sea levels may cause the shrinking of SIDS’ land and maritime boundaries, and even their complete submergence. Traditional interpretations of international law suggest that states must possess inhabitable land, such that many SIDS may well be doomed to legal extinction. In this paper, I attack this view. The City & The City not only illuminates how international law ‘unsees’ particular communities; it also acts as an ‘intuition pump’ for the diverse possibilities that might exist were international law to exhibit greater legal imagination. Besźel and Ul Qoma might exist in an unconventional and fictional relation to land, but they do so both plausibly and stably. If we can imagine such bizarre arrangements working, why not also imagine states with no relation to inhabitable land at all?

Ectogestation as emancipation: A feminist science fiction

Zoe L Tongue (University of Leeds)

This paper engages with the debate on whether ectogestation could lead to gender equality, or whether the technology would become oppressive when developed within our current society. Considering the systems of reproductive governance currently operating worldwide, ectogestation is unlikely to have an emancipatory impact were it to be developed in this context. However, this paper puts forward the argument that the notion of ectogestation as emancipatory should be retained as a feminist science fiction project, which can help us think through broader social transformations in line with Shulamith Firestone’s original manifesto for the artificial womb. Looking to the concept of ‘utopia as method’, this paper considers what it would mean to take up Firestone’s call to seize the means of reproduction and reclaim ectogestation’s emancipatory potential if it were to be developed in our time. This paper considers the feminist self-help movements, historic and current, to provide access to abortion where it is criminalised or restricted, as a blueprint for self-managed ectogestation.

Tea and Coffee Break

3-3.30pm

Panel II: Persons of the Legal Imaginary

3.30-5pm

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 (European University Institute)

This paper delves into the intricate relationship between science fiction and the legal frameworks surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI). It offers a comparative analysis of Isaac Asimov's 'Laws of Robotics' and Philip K. Dick's 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' to explore how these seminal works inform our understanding of AI regulation. Asimov's structured laws provide a systematic approach to AI governance, while Dick's narrative stimulates ethical and moral contemplation. The paper argues that science fiction serves as an 'intellectual map,' aiding in the acceleration of legal processes and minimizing ambiguities. It highlights the adaptive nature of Asimov's laws and their enduring relevance in cross-disciplinary discussions. The paper also examines the challenges of applying and interpreting these laws, particularly the complexities in defining 'harm.' It concludes by emphasizing the role of science fiction in shaping public discourse and steering policy directions.

Science fiction, science and fiction of and for algorithmic agents in law

AM Waltermann (Maastricht University)

Questions of the legal and moral agency and responsibility of artificially intelligent entities become increasingly more pressing. Works of science fiction imagine numerous possibilities regarding the role and treatment of algorithmic agents in future societies and raise (metaphysical) questions about what it takes to truly be an agent. The paper turns from science fiction to science and finds that the (metaphysical) understanding of human beings as paradigmatic agents that emerges from the current best scientific theories is one of – highly complex – physical creatures who, through their ascriptions of agency and responsibility, create responsible agents. What are the implications for law? On one reading, very few. This is because law – by means of legal fictions or social ontology, depending on one’s theoretical framing – is constitutive of (the legal) part of our social reality, including agency- and responsibility-ascriptions, irrespective of metaphysics. Given, then, that the law can – by means of fiction – create parts of reality, the paper argues that the important question is what kind of fictions we want to make real. This is a question that can be explored through science fiction, which brings the paper full circle, from science fiction to science to fiction and back.