Most people are probably familiar with the movie Minority Report. If you haven’t seen it, you probably know the premise: Three mutants precognatives (or “precogs”) foresee murders, and based on their visions, the police arrest the would-be killers before the crimes happen, and then lock them away.
Fewer people are aware that the movie is based on the 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick. And even fewer still are aware that the concept of punishing people based on precognition first appeared in fiction 75 years earlier in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. In the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the white chess pieces have a rather unique justice system, based on the the White Queen’s ability to see into the future. Here, the White Queen has imprisoned Mad Hatter for some unspecified future crime:
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,” the Queen remarked.
“What sort of things do you remember best?” Alice ventured to ask.
“Oh, things that happened the week after next,” the Queen replied in a careless tone. “For instance, now,” she went on, sticking a large piece of plaster on her finger as she spoke, “there’s the King’s messenger. He’s in prison now, being punished, and the trial doesn’t even begin till next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all.”
“Suppose he never commits the crime?” said Alice.
“That would be all the better, wouldn’t it?” the Queen said, as she bound the plaster round her finger with a bit of ribbon.
Of course, there’s a major difference in the Looking-Glass and Minority Report concepts of future law (as it’s sometimes called). In Minority Report, the precogs are almost always wrong about their predictions. The visions they have don’t come true. The police intervene, thus creating a very odd sort of paradox in which people are punished for crimes they didn’t commit. I suppose noone thought to just charge them with attempted murder and avoid all the problems, but that’s beside the point.
In Looking-Glass though, the crimes do actually happen, because the Queen is not predicting crimes, but rather “remembering” them. Somehow Carroll has managed to create a less philosophically problematic future law system.
Many law schools have a class on “Law and Literature.” Looking through several of the syllabi available online reveals what one might expect: Shakespeare, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Plato, Sophocles, aka: The Biggies. I could find none with either Through the Looking-Glass or Minority Report. It’s almost as though Law and Literature professors are just teaching whatever books were taught when they took the class years ago, just like real literature professors!
P.S.: Like with the transition from book to movie with The Maltese Falcon, the 50 year old fat and balding John Anderton somehow becomes Tom Cruise on the big screen.
