ABSTRACT
Changing the future' suggests that one might travel to some time in the past and alter it so that what follows is other than what we know it to have been. Setting aside its prima facie entertainment value, as already established in the UK television franchise Doctor Who, the physical plausibility of this general orientation to the world presumes that space-time is 'positively curved' in a humanly meaningful way. Judges routinely 'change the future' in the above sense when they overturn a previous ruling by appealing to another precedent that is presented as more fundamental. A substantial change in policy is thus legitimized without having to deny a common legal tradition with the overturned ruling. An analogous insight can be found in Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, perhaps the most influential work on the nature of science in the twentieth century.
