Technical Legality: Law, Technology and Science Fiction
01 Jan 2010-
TL;DR: In this article, the intersections of law and technology, referred to here as technical legality, are explored through taking science fiction seriously, and it is argued that reflection on technical legality reveals the mythic of modernity.
Abstract: This thesis concerns the intersections of law and technology, referred to here as
‘technical legality’. It argues that reflection on technical legality reveals the
mythic of modernity. The starting point for the argument is that the orthodox
framing of technology by law – the ‘law and technology enterprise’ – does not
comprehend its own speculative jurisdiction – that is, it fails to realise its oracle
orientation towards imagining the future. In this science fiction as the modern
West’s mythform, as the repository for projections of technological futures, is
recognised as both the law and technology enterprise’s wellspring and cipher.
What is offered in this thesis is a more thorough exploration of technical
legality through taking science fiction seriously. This seriousness results in two
implications for the understanding of technical legality. The first implication is
that the anxieties and fantasies that animate the calling forth of law by technology
become clearer. Science fiction operates as a window into the cultural milieu that
frames law-making moments. In locating law-making events – specifically the
making of the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and the Motor Car
Act 1909 (Vic) – with the clone ‘canon’ in science fiction (specifically Star Trek:
Nemesis (2002)) and H.G. Wells’ scientific romances, what is offered is a much
richer understanding of how the cultural framing of technology becomes law than
that provided by the ‘pragmatic’ positivism of the law and technology enterprise.
The second implication arises from the excess that appears at the margins
of the richer analyses. Exploring technical legality through science fiction does
not remain within the epistemological frame. Each of the analyses gestures
towards something essential about technical legality. The law and technology
enterprise is grounded on the modern myth, which is also the myth of modernity – Frankenstein. It tells a story of monstrous technology, vulnerable humanity and
saving law. The analyses of the Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and
the Motor Car Act 1909 (Vic) show that this narrative is terrorised, that the saving
law turns out to be the monster in disguise; that the law called forth by technology
is in itself technological. In extended readings of two critically acclaimed science
fictions, Frank Herbert’s Dune cycle (1965–83) and the recent television series
Battlestar Galactica (2003–10), the essential commitments of technological law
are exposed. Dune as technical legality makes clear that technological law is truly
monstrous, for behind its positivism and sovereignty its essence is with the
alchemy of death and time. Battlestar Galactica as technical legality reduces
further the alchemical properties of technical law. Battlestar Galactica moves the
metaphysical highlight to the essence of technology and very nearly ends with
Heidegger’s demise of Being in ‘Enframing’: monstrous technology and
monstrous law reveal a humanity that cannot be saved. However, at the very
moment of this fall, Battlestar Galactica collapses the metaphysical frame,
affirming technological Being-in-the-world over empty ordering, life over death.
This free responsibility to becoming that emerges from Battlestar
Galactica reunites technical legality with the mythic of modernity. The modern
denial of myth, which allowed Frankenstein to narrate technical legality, has been
challenged. Free responsibility to becoming means a confidence with myths; it clears the way for the telling of new stories about law and technology.
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TL;DR: In this paper, a judge in some representative American jurisdiction is assumed to accept the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction and to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l
Abstract: 1.. HARD CASES 5. Legal Rights A. Legislation . . . We might therefore do well to consider how a philosophical judge might develop, in appropriate cases, theories of what legislative purpose and legal principles require. We shall find that he would construct these theories in the same manner as a philosophical referee would construct the character of a game. I have invented, for this purpose, a lawyer of superhuman skill, learning, patience and acumen, whom I shall call Hercules. I suppose that Hercules is a judge in some representative American jurisdiction. I assume that he accepts the main uncontroversial constitutive and regulative rules of the law in his jurisdiction. He accepts, that is, that statutes have the general power to create and extinguish legal rights, and that judges have the general duty to follow earlier decisions of their court or higher courts whose rationale, as l
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References
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TL;DR: For example, the recent decision by Los Angeles County officials to install more than 900 plastic trees and shrubs in concrete planters along the median strip of a major boulevard as discussed by the authors, where the construction of a new box culvert left only 12 to 18 inches of dirt on the strip, insufficient to sustain natural trees.
Abstract: Baudelaire's Rave Parisien paints what is quite literally a still life -a dreamscape of a metallic city where groves of colonnades stand in the place of trees and, in the place of water, pools of lead.2 More prosaic but no less unnerving was the recent decision by Los Angeles County officials to install more than 900 plastic trees and shrubs in concrete planters along the median strip of a major boulevard.3 The construction of a new box culvert, it seemed, had left only 12 to 18 inches of dirt on the strip, insufficient to sustain natural trees.4 County officials decided to experiment with artificial plants constructed of factory-made leaves and branches wired to plumbing pipes, covered with plastic and \"planted\" in aggregate rock coated with epoxy.' Although a number of the trees were torn down by unknown vandals\" and further plantings were halted, 7 the tale may not be over. For an article in Sciences suggested recently that, just as advertising
115 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1940
TL;DR: My parents, bless their hearts, were remarkably prescient and self-denying; when early in 1933 a longtime English friend wrote to them that a well-to-do Anglo-Jewish couple she knew was anxious to help and had offered to provide a London home for a German-Jewish boy, they quickly made up their minds to send me.
Abstract: My parents, bless their hearts, were remarkably prescient and self-denying. When early in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler had seized power in Germany, a longtime English friend wrote to them that a well-to-do Anglo-Jewish couple she knew was anxious to help and had offered to provide a London home for a German-Jewish boy, they quickly made up their minds to send me. Many of their friends tried to talk them out of this plan. The whole Hitler nightmare, they said, would blow over quickly; besides, a twelve-year-old child's place was with his family. But my parents stuck by their decision. True, Father had already been dismissed from his teaching position and Mother could no longer publish in German newspapers; still, they themselves would stay. But there was no future in the "new" Germany, they thought, for a youngster like me. As for that youngster's own wishes, in later years my parents often teased me about my eagerness to go. "Macht Tempo!" ("Hurry up!") I'm supposed to have grumbled, using current Berlin slang. No sentimentalist, I! So in the following October Mother escorted her only child on the long trainand boat ride to London's Liverpool Street Station. I was given my first English lesson in the Mitropa Dining Car. "How do you do?" "Good morning!" "Good evening!" "Please" "Thank You." Mother made me repeat such words and phrases over and over again. After all, I had to start from scratch.
114 citations
01 Jan 2001
TL;DR: Visualising JRR Tolkein's Middle-earth involved creating CG creatures, entirely digital environments, armies of tens of thousands of soldiers, each driven by his own artificial-life "brain and simulated senses, as well as coming up with a bag of tricks to solve the problem of making fullsize actors appear at hobbit scale.
Abstract: Visualising JRR Tolkein's Middle-earth involved creating CG creatures, entirely digital environments, armies of tens of thousands of soldiers, each driven by his own artificial-life "brain" and simulated senses, as well as coming up with a bag of tricks to solve the problem of making fullsize actors appear at hobbit scale.
The scope of the task ranged from vast battlefields where everything in frame was created with CGI to the smallest of things, a digital version of "The One Ring" itself.
107 citations
TL;DR: The authors argued that the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is, either as a failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained and transformed.
Abstract: In this paper I shall suggest that law is most usefully seen not, as it usually is by academics and philosophers, as a system of rules, but as a branch of rhetoric; and that the kind of rhetoric of which law is a species is most usefully seen not, as rhetoric usually is, either as a failed science or as the ignoble art of persuasion, but as the central art by which community and culture are established, maintained, and transformed. So regarded, rhetoric is continuous with law, and like it, has justice as its ultimate subject. I do not mean to say that these are the only ways to understand law or rhetoric. There is a place in the world for institutional and policy studies, for taxonomies of persuasive devices, and for analyses of statistical patterns and distributive effects. But I think that all these activities will themselves be performed and criticized more intelligently if it is recognized that they too are rhetorical. As for law and rhetoric themselves, I think that to see them in the way I suggest is to make sense of them in a more nearly complete way, especially from the point of view of the individual speaker, the individual hearer, and the individual judge.
106 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1994
TL;DR: Asking the law question common law theory positivism and natural law legal service critical legal studies feminism post-modernism and deconstruction as mentioned in this paper is a popular topic in legal education.
Abstract: Asking the law question common law theory positivism and natural law legal service critical legal studies feminism post-modernism and deconstruction. (Part contents).
105 citations
Additional excerpts
...140 Davies (2008), pp 194–195....
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