Thomas D.C. Bennett – författare

This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal imagination.’Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout the legal system. The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability.The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future.The work provides stimulating reading for those working in the areas of legal philosophy, legal history and law and humanities and law and language.

This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal imagination.’Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout the legal system. The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability.The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future.The work provides stimulating reading for those working in the areas of legal philosophy, legal history and law and humanities and law and language.

In 2004, a judgment from the highest court in the UK gave birth to a new era of privacy law. That case, brought by the supermodel Naomi Campbell against Mirror Group Newspapers, is today rightly regarded as a turning point for the protection of individuals’ privacy. The case is seen as the turning point in the development of English privacy law, and has also had major implications for the law elsewhere, including in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Canada. The manner in which the common law’s privacy protections have developed since, and the direction in which they might develop still further, are the subject of this book. This collection, written by leading scholars in the privacy field from the UK and beyond, considers the legacy of Campbell’s case. The contributors address the Campbell legacy from a range of legal perspectives and discuss broader themes of power, metaphor, consistency, and technological change. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Media Law.

This collection offers the first sustained, multidisciplinary legal analysis of deepfakes and their far‑reaching consequences.Deepfake technology has moved with disorienting speed from fringe curiosity to a global social, political and legal problem. Once the preserve of Hollywood studios, the ability to fabricate hyper‑realistic images, audio and video is now available to anyone with a smartphone. Its most prevalent and devastating use remains the creation of non‑consensual sexually explicit content targeting women. Yet deepfakes also fuel political disinformation, destabilise democratic processes, enable fraud and identity theft, and contribute to a broader post‑truth climate in which the authenticity of all digital evidence becomes contestable. In this landscape, one of the most urgent tasks is simply to begin the right conversations about how law and society should respond. Across three sections, an international array of scholars examine how synthetic media challenges foundational assumptions about privacy, image rights, evidential truth and democratic integrity. These essays explore deepfakes’ profound impact on the individual dignity of both the living and the dead, their capacity to generate epistemic uncertainty, and the structural difficulties they pose for courts, regulators and lawmakers. Bringing together theoretical, doctrinal and comparative insights, the book illuminates a fragmented regulatory landscape and articulates both the pressing need for more coherent, principled governance of synthetic media, and some of the difficulties that will necessarily be encountered by those designing regulatory measures.This is a timely and vital volume for scholars, jurists and legislators concerned with the future of truth, autonomy and accountability in an increasingly synthetic world.