‘Come a Day there Won’t be Room for Naughty Men Like Us to Slip About at All’: the multi-media outlaws of Serenity and the possibilities of post-literate justice

Abstract

If legal theory has only recently become aware of the pain and problems of law’s textual medium what is to be made of a culture where information exchange through reading and writing becomes displaced by the visual and physical acts of icon manipulation? How is justice to be achieved in a coming post-literate age of quasi-hieroglyphics; that is the emerging media of graphic user interfaces on touchscreens? In a ‘software-sorted society’ (Murakami Wood and Graham 2006) can there be something external to the code that can be justice? Further, can this justice be more than just a refugee of earlier legalities, but be a true measure of the emerging techno-totality? Notwithstanding the remaining challenges of poverty, violence, gender and rights bequeathed by the past to contemporary legal thought, it is at this nexus of medium, justice and power being birthed by the leap to digitality that ‘the future’ confronts legal thinking.