Serendipity In Star Wars

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"Human beings often see coherence and planned design when neither exists. This is so in movies, literature, history, economics, and psychoanalysis—and constitutional law. Contrary to the repeated claims of George Lucas, its principal author, the Star Wars series was hardly planned in advance; it involved a great deal of improvisation and surprise, even to Lucas himself. Serendipity and happenstance, sometimes in the forms of eruptions of new thinking, play a pervasive and overlooked role in the creative imagination, certainly in single-authored works, and even more in multi-authored ones extending over time. Serendipity imposes serious demands on the search for coherence in art, literature, history, and law. That search leads many people…show more content…
That's when Darth Vader (imagine James Earl Jones' voice) tells Luke Skywalker: "No. I am your father." Of these various points, the most important by far, and the one that can be taken to stand for the whole, is that Lucas decided only at a relatively late stage that Darth Vader is Luke’s father. The "I am your father" moment—which will play a large role in this review, and which has analogues in many fields, including law—is one in which Lucas took Star Wars on a fresh narrative path, one that fit well (enough) with what had gone before, but that cast an entirely new light on it, and that was essentially unanticipated by Lucas himself. So how does this mesh with constitutional law? Sunstein essentially says that, like Lucas, the law changes course with the times or by happenstance, whether we want to admit it or not. A movie or a novel is bounded in the sense that it has an ending. (We may hope that this is not true for the Star War series, but still.) Law is not similarly bounded in time. One implication is that in law, new and unanticipated circumstances and problems will inevitably arise, making it especially difficult or perhaps even impossible to ensure coherence. (Consider the rise of the telephone and the Internet, the increase in national markets, the changing role of women, new norms with respect to sexual

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