by Graeme Newman and the Machine

Why do we need rules? Who makes them? Who benefits from them? And what happens when we begin to question them?

Rules: An Argument with The Machine is a unique collection of short stories exploring one of the most fundamental features of human society: rules.

From ancient villages to futuristic cities, from courts of law to battlefields, from schools and prisons to utopian experiments, these stories examine the rules that govern our lives and the consequences of obeying, bending, or breaking them.

But this is more than a collection of stories.

Each story began as a collaboration between author Graeme Newman and an artificial intelligence. The Machine produced a story. The author responded, sometimes agreeing, often challenging, and occasionally mocking the machine's tendency toward optimism, redemption, and tidy moral conclusions. The result became an ongoing conversation about law, justice, power, morality, freedom, authority, conformity, and human nature itself.

As the stories unfold, a second narrative emerges:

• Can society exist without rules?

• Can rules exist without injustice?

• And can a machine ever understand the messy realities of human life?

Part philosophical inquiry, part social commentary, part literary experiment, Rules: An Argument with a Machine invites readers to join a lively debate between human skepticism and artificial optimism.

The stories may not provide definitive answers. But they ask questions worth arguing about.

In This Volume

• In the beginning: The origins of rules and morality

• The rise of rulers and authority

• Law, punishment, and social control

• Rule worshippers and rule breakers

• Utopias, dystopias, and "Ruletopia"

• The continuing dialogue between a human author and his machine co-author

For readers interested in social issues, criminal justice, political thought, philosophy, artificial intelligence, and the strange ways stories can illuminate the human condition.

Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. 2026. p.192.

Edited by Virginia Mantouvalou and Jonathan Wolff

In developing her conception of structural injustice, Iris Marion Young made a strict distinction between large-scale collective injustice that results from the normal functions of a society, and the more familiar concepts of individual wrong and deliberate state repression. Her ideas have attracted considerable attention in political philosophy, but legal theorists have been slower to consider the relation between structural injustice and legal analysis. While some forms of vulnerability to structural injustice can be the unintended consequences of legal rules, the law also has potential instruments to alleviate some forms of structural injustice. Structural Injustice and the Law presents theoretical approaches and concrete examples to show how the concept of structural injustice can aid legal analysis, and how legal reform can, in practice, reduce or even eliminate some forms of structural injustice. A group of outstanding law and political philosophy scholars discuss a comprehensive range of interdisciplinary topics, including the notion of domination, equality and human rights law, legal status, sweatshop labour, labour law, criminal justice, domestic homicide reviews, begging, homelessness, regulatory public bodies and the films of Ken Loach. Drawn together, they build an invaluable resource for legal theorists exploring how to make use of the concept of structural injustice, and for political philosophers looking for a nuanced account of the law’s role both in creating and mitigating structural injustice.

London: UCL Press, 2024. 334p.