This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the 'legal imagination'.

Richard Mullender is Professor in Law and Legal Theory in Newcastle University Law School (the UK).

Matteo Nicolini is Associate Professor of Public Comparative Law at the Department of Law of the University of Verona (Italy).

Thomas D.C. Bennett is a Lecturer in Law at City, University of London (the UK).

Emilia Mickiewicz is Lecturer in Law at Newcastle University Law School and the SLS jurisprudence stream convenor (the UK).

Chapter 1;
Legal Imagination in Trouble Times: An Introduction;

Part One - Imagination, Law, and History: Framing the Future;

Chapter 2;
The Progress of Legal Education in England;

Chapter 3;
The Dragon in the Cave: Fleta as a Legal Imagining of Early English Common Law;

Chapter 4;
The Apotheosis of King Charles I;

Part Two - The Courts and the Legal Imagination;

Chapter 5;
Pathologies of Imagination and Legitimacy of Judicial Decision Making;

Chapter 6;
Law and Belief: The Reality of Judicial Interpretation;

Chapter 7;
Legal Imagination or an Extra-Legal Hoax: On Storytelling, Friends of the Court and Crossing Legal Boundaries in the US Supreme Court;

Part Three - Thought, Stylistics and Discourse;

Chapter 8;
The French Revolution and the Programmatic Imagination: Hilary Mantel on Law, Politics, and Misery;

Chapter 9;
Internal Coherence and the Possibility of Judicial Integrity;

Chapter 10;
Legal Humanism: 'Stylistic Imagination' and the Making of Legal Traditions;

Part Four - The Future of the Legal Imagination

Chapter 11;
Depicting the End of the American Frontier: Some Thoughts on Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove Series;

Chapter 12;
Coleridge's Dystopia and the Optics of Law;

Chapter 13;
Against the Failure of the Legal Imagination. Literary Narratives, Brexit and the Sort of the Anglo-British Constitution;