ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the stories told within popular culture, and in particular the forms of speculative fiction so favoured by Hollywood in recent times, both inform people's concepts of law, legality and justice but also put those concepts into question, 'making strange' their traditional understanding so that they can see them anew. In The Stillborn God, Mark Lilla describes the stories that we tell ourselves about how our world came to be, including terms such as 'modernization, secularization, democratization "the disenchantment of the world", as the 'fairy tales of our time'. The traditional focus of the disciplines of 'law and literature' and 'law and film' has been on what could be termed the socio-legal analysis of the representations of law, legal institutions and legal actors in cultural texts. The mythologies and stories of law themselves are engaged in a mode of speculative re-creating of the world.
