Short description:

This book examines how science fiction informs the legal imagination of technological futures.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

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