Working With Legal Futures: Conceptualizing, Investigating, Imagining and Making

Abstract

This paper seeks to prompt and facilitate the development of an epistemic community centering on legal futures. It does this firstly, by clarifying the dimension along which legal thinkers and practitioners do and might work with legal futures — conceptualizing and investigating, imagining and making relationships between legal and wider social life across time. Secondly, it highlights how legal thinkers and practitioners might draw on other disciplines, especially sociology, future studies and design, to become more ‘futures-capable.’ Thirdly, it emphasizes that legal thinkers and practitioners have a moral obligation to work with legal futures, because we must take responsibility for what Barbara Adam terms ‘futures-in-the-making’.

Keywords: legal futures, legal design, futures literacy, anticipation, imagination