Date:
Location:
"The Ascent of Science Fictional Futurity in Anglo-American Legal Thought"
Speaker:
Michael Bennett, University of Michigan, Risk Science Center.
Lunch is provided if you RSVP via our online form by Wednesday the week before the event.
Contact:
Shana Rabinowich
shana_rabinowich@hks.harvard.edu
Chair:
Sheila Jasanoff, Faculty Associate. Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Harvard Kennedy School.
Abstract: The deployment of future figures represents a mode of activity that is rarely explicitly invoked or centralized in legal strategy, research or theoretical framings, even though it is implicit in various traditional functions of Trans-Atlantic legal practice and tendencies of thought. Over the last two decades, however, this mode has become more prominent in legal discourse, particularly in the indicial proxy form of “science fiction.” Using four representative texts of considerable influence in contemporary legal education and practice—Bell’s (1992) The Space Traders, Posner’s (2004) Catastrophe, Lessig’s (2006) Code 2.0 and Susskind’s (2013) Tomorrow’s Lawyers—and distant reading of thousands of other texts gathered from the historical legal database, HeinOnline, I situate this legal futural figure’s deployment within the context of future- and imaginary-oriented analytical methods common to STS scholarship. The main goals of this exercise are to better understand both why and how the legal community fashions and circulates such figures, and to assess the constitutional and visionary work futural deployments do in the legal community.
Biography: Dr. Michael G. Bennett’s research and legal consultancy focus on the societal implications of emerging technoscience, with particular emphasis on the domains of nanotechnologies, comparative intellectual property law and policy, legal practice and legal education. He consults and works with a wide range of clients and collaborators on these matters, including several academic institutions, intellectual property practitioners, domestic federal agencies, and technology governance organizations in Australia and Spain. Michael is an assistant research professor in the Risk Science Center and the Department of Health Management & Policy at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, the Special Advisor on Technology and Legal Practice at the Northeastern University School of Law’s NuLawLab, and a visiting Associate Research Professor at Arizona State’s Consortium for Science and Policy Outcomes. He received his juris doctorate from Harvard Law School and his doctorate in Science and Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
