Worldmaking, Legal Education, and the Saga Comic Book Series

This article argues that to disrupt legal education in a radical sense, students need to become acquainted with the art of worldmaking and the view that law is a “way of worldmaking”. First, I show that law is a cultural semiotic practice that requires decoding and, for that reason, demands a creative intervention by those that want to know, understand, and do things with law. Altogether this amounts to recognizing the different modes in which law creates, and is part of, worlds. Second, I propose that due to different features of their aesthetic form, comics are a particularly effective medium to place students before the myriad ways in which law and lawyers make and reproduce worlds. Third, I illustrate the argument by exploring how the Saga comic series, through its formal multimodality and narrative and cultural complexity, can make good on that challenge.