Strange legalities
Nine short stories about people, law and tech
The concept
The legal sector is full of predictions right now: fast-paced forecasts, competing visions, endless speculation about what AI means for law. It's not always helpful.
Strange Legalities takes a different approach. In late 2025 and early 2026, a group of noslegal community members explored the future through fiction instead. Nine short stories that surface questions pure analysis might miss.
All nine stories were written personally by the authors, not by AI. The accompanying images were generated with AI tools.
The collection is free to read and share.
The stories
The Registrar's Book | Leanne Cummings
In an underground human court, a machine proxy asks to be judged
The Phantom Citation | Nabiha Khwaja
Reprimanded for faking a precedent, Nora hatches a plan to fix things
Edging it | Graeme Johnston
A criminal justice entrepreneur reminisces
Plot 1125/4: Not found | Clare Bilobrk
An auditor investigates an anomaly flagged by a digital land registry
Progress | Graeme Johnston
A lecturer asks students to consider the great reforms of the 2030s
When Metadata Becomes the Law | Samridhi Jain
A taxonomising system decides to make the law more coherent
Time out | Graeme Johnston
A lawyer seeks to cope within an optimised business model
The Hype's Not Over | Katy Snell
Exhausted by endless legal tech hype? Time for some musical relief
Judg-E v7.3: In the Interests of Swift Justice |
Leanne Cummings
An ultra-efficient digital judge reflects
The authors
Clare Bilobrk
Leanne Cummings
Samridhi Jain
Graeme Johnston
Nabiha Khwaja
Katy Snell
The License
Strange Legalities is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence. You're free to copy and share the whole collection or individual stories, with attribution, for non-commercial purposes.
The future - get involved
This collection grew out of the noslegal community's curiosity about the bigger picture; the human stories behind the standards work. If you'd like to contribute to future creative projects, or get involved in the community more broadly, we'd love to hear from you.