Legal imagination in troubled times

Abstract

Imagination is a cultural competence, a faculty of mind, a capacity for comprehension, synthesis, and creativity. In times of crisis, uncertainty, and political turmoil, the need for imagination in law becomes most prominent. The legal imagination has attracted the interest of academic scholars since Boyd White published The Legal Imagination. Another seminal text is Alan Watson’s Failures of the Legal Imagination. Disarticulation is indeed the outcome of sectionalism, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘confinement of interest to a narrow sphere, narrowness of outlook, undue accentuation of minor local, political, or social distinctions.’ The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ because it focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability. The collection probes the role imagination plays in law during troubled times – both in contemporary such times and historically. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.