The Doctor and Technical Lawyering

Abstract

This chapter argues that the British science fiction television icon Doctor Who provides guidance on how to live well as an entity designated ‘lawyer’ within the networks of technical legality. Technical legality challenges the received tradition of legal ethics. Lawyering is revealed not as a ‘profession’ but a demonic calling to be an alchemist of death and time. This calling to be a ‘time lord’ who brings ‘death’ immediately suggests Doctor Who. A consistent theme through the unfolding text that is Doctor Who has been the ‘ethics’ of the Doctor. The Doctor overcomes and endures because the weight of his responsibility for death and time is within his time lord being. There is neither sound judgment nor technical somnambulism in the Doctor’s actions. Instead his actions appear as a hybrid of both, unified by an acceptance that actions performed from this location break, change and destroy the networks of the present. Ultimately, the Doctor shows that lawyering within technical legality demands an accepting of the powers of time and death to safeguard ‘life.’