The Time-traveling Lawyer: Using Time Travel Stories and Science Fiction in Legal Education

Science fiction and time travel can be used to inform and enhance the education of law students in profound ways. Within the broader field of law and literature, the relationship between law and science fiction, especially time travel stories, is rich and useful. Themes and concepts in time travel can be applied in the exploration of existing legal philosophies as well as a more expansive and engaging study of power, authority, freedom, and a number of global issues. As governments and people worldwide wrestle with climate change, armed conflict, pandemics, and the increasing significance of artificial intelligence and other advances in technology, time travel stories give students unique contexts in which to consider what law is and the degree to which it defines human experience. For generations, brilliant science fiction writers have offered thought-provoking stories and worlds that law professors and their students can use to reimagine legal thought and practice. Like its close relatives, mythology and fantasy, the science fiction genre is untethered to current social or political experience or projections necessarily corrupted by narrowly conceived historical perspectives. Science fiction writers are interested in illuminating possibilities by considering identifiable problems in unidentifiable environments. It is no accident that gender identity, racism, reproductive rights, extremist ideologies, global health crises, and various recognizable forms of labor exploitation are addressed in provocative and insightful ways by a number of the best science fiction writers. Law has a strong presence in their work. Judges, law givers, ruling groups, and other less familiar forms of power and control appear in these stories and help to move and shape the experience of the time traveler. Law students can draw on the work of these writers to consider old questions in new and refreshingly broad ways. The importance of communication and access to information are also strong themes common to law and science fiction. How are concepts of truth and propaganda significant to power? Is truth necessary for legitimacy? Information technologies introduced in the science fiction world now exist in real time in forms and with speed and volume unimagined even a few decades ago. As artificial intelligence becomes dominant in many aspects of our daily lives, law students must consider how it may change law making, court procedures, entire legal systems, and perhaps even concepts of justice. As a project, law students might develop a case and conduct a trial using an AI judge or try a case to an AI jury. How human is the law? The role of emotional intelligence and concepts like mercy, restorative justice, forgiveness, or retribution are also things they might explore in seminars or other classes using science fiction literature and other time travel media as a framework.