This special issue began life a decade ago when one of the authors was trying to complete a doctorate that linked (impossibly) legal theory, thinking about technology and science fiction together. In doing so John McCormack’s Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism:Against Politics as Technology1proved insightful in suggesting how Schmitt bridged legal and technological thought. This interest in Schmitt led to looking at Ellen Kennedy’s Constitutional Failure: Carl Schmitt in Weimar. And Kennedy mentions an early publication by a young Schmitt that was a work of fiction which described‘Buribunken...scribes and record keepers who had merge[d] with the machines that they use and the documents that they keep’