Ankesh Chandaria (University of Cambridge; University of Cambridge – Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence) has posted De Legis Utopiae: Law and Law-Making in Literary Utopia on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper examines the role of law in literary utopian thought through a comparative reading of Utopia (1516) and A Modern Utopia (1905). Although utopian texts are often interpreted as satire or political allegory, this study approaches them as normative institutional models and asks how law functions within imagined perfect societies. It argues that law is not displaced in utopia but remains central to the realization and maintenance of each author’s ideal social order. Through close textual analysis, the paper shows that legal institutions, legislative structures, and systems of punishment are deliberately organized around distinct normative priorities. In More’s Utopia, law advances collective welfare by preserving stable governance, regulating labour, and facilitating communal resource allocation. In Wells’ World State, law instead structures conditions for individual self-direction, emphasizing participatory legislation, voluntary civic discipline, and rehabilitative sanction. Despite these differences, both works depend upon law as an institutional mechanism for sustaining social equilibrium in the face of persistent human imperfection. The comparison suggests that literary utopias do not imagine the transcendence of law, but its refinement: law functions as the stabilizing architecture through which utopian ideals are rendered durable over time.