To know what society fears, look at their dystopias. In the aftermath of two world wars, Nineteen Eighty-Four emerged as a surveillance state sharing characteristics of far-right Nazi totalitarianism and far-left Stalinist socialism. Observing the unearthing of the roots of American Puritanism and the marked bias against women, Margaret Atwood penned The Handmaid’s Tale, an imagining of a patriarchal system defined by theocratic totalitarianism and female degradation. The dystopian elements of these societies are defined by an underlying legal order that actively works to shape religion, sexual pleasure and language—the building blocks that make up our lives.

This research arises out of the observation of an impression that legal and political scholars seem to share: that dystopias always seem to come on the heels of its opposite, the utopia. If legal orders are the bones that form the utopian society, what is it about the law that turns utopia into the very thing they sought to destroy?

By drawing on political theories of anarchism and the ambiguous utopia of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, this study aims to show how the dystopia and utopia are not binary opposites but deeply interlinked in a symbiotic relationship, and the role of the law in the creation of both. If the threat of dystopia compels us to constantly recreate utopia, law must constitute only a reaction to social issues, allowing us to prudently and incrementally inch towards utopia.