Cabinet of Imaginary Laws

<p>Returning to the map of the island of utopia this book provides a contemporary inventive addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive let alone a bold imaginary project an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come.</p><p><em>The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws</em> is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression the celebrated and unknown venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law film science history philosophy political science aesthetics architecture and the classics become for a brief and inspiring instance legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions<i> </i>aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse collage artworks short stories harangues lists and other pleas reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. </p><p>Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines this book will appeal especially to theorists lawyers scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.</p>