Orwell's Legal Theory in "1984"

Nicolás López Pérez, University of Chile School of Law, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, has published Dystopias and Legal Theory: A View from Orwell's 1984. Here is the abstract.

This essay will focus on the society that Orwell tries to build with the story and how he denotes a legal system that could be analyzed by the legal theory, principally with methodological tools situated in the analytical jurisprudence. For this purpose, I will divide the essay in two axis: first, a brief synthesis of the book with its main features, then identify elements related to society and Law studies, and answer: why “1984” is a subject of analysis; second, the sketch of the semantics and the discursivity of some important concepts for legal theory as State, Legal System, Authority, and Morality, present in the Orwell’s work with the appropriate discussion in analytical jurisprudence, principally with Raz’s works.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.