Living in Technical Legality

'Tranter leverages his prior work to produce a masterful examination of what it means to be living in an era that seems infused with sci-fi tropes from the past. This is a valuable contribution to law and technology studies.'
Arthur Cockfield, Queen's University, Ontario

Through detailed readings of popular science fictions, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television's Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this book presents the first sustained examination of the legality of science fiction.

Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about 'nature' and 'culture' have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished. There has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an 'end' and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However, this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency.

By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, Living in Technical Legality journeys with the partially consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected: rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and 'life' for the nodes in the networks. Through its science-fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.

Kieran Tranter is Associate Professor at Griffith Law School, Griffith University.

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ISBN 978-1-4744-2089-1
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