Critical Future Studies

This talk explores science fiction as a legal research method for examining the futures of law. A growing body of work in cultural studies has lamented the slow cancellation of the future. This loss of futurity has resulted in the production of an epistemological ever-present characterized by both its freneticism and lack of social change. Within law and the law school, this ever-present manifests in neoliberal short-termism—an emphasis on employability metrics, professionalization of the law degree, and immediate impact goals—rather than sustained structural transformation.

In response, the talk advocates for science fiction as a distinctive methodological tool. Science fiction is not just speculative entertainment; it can stimulate innovative approaches to justice, open up alternative conceptions of political and legal structures, and extrapolate the dangers of current social trends. By adopting science fiction as method, the humanities become central to resisting the neoliberal narrowing of legal and political imagination. They provide the conceptual resources we need to think otherwise—and, crucially, to imagine futures for law beyond the epistemological ever-present.

Mitchell Travis is an Associate Professor of Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds. He is the co-editor of Law, Technology and Human’s special issue ‘Jurisprudence of the Future’ (2022), and two Routledge edited collections Cultural Legal Studies of Science Fiction (2024) and Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary (2024). He is also the co-author of Intersex Embodiment: Legal Frameworks Beyond Identity and Disorder with Bristol University Press.