A four-year-old post from the Volokh Conspiracy, but still mightily interesting...Eugene asks about "magical legalism"--"stories about law or lawyers that are basically set in the real world but with some magical or fantastic twist." He also asks who actually invented this phrase. I wonder if that person ever got back to him.
In the comments are some wonderful suggestions, including Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy stories, a Simpsons Halloween episode, Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster, Wolff & Byrd, and some of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein's work. I think I'd also throw in James Blish's A Case of Conscience and H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy series, which deal with norms if not law. See also this page from TVTropes.
Incidentally, I Googled the term "magical legalism" and I did find a use of the term in a work by Julieta Lemaitre called Legal Fetishism at Home and Abroad. Here's the sentence. "In legal theory the persistent metaphor to describe personal attachment to law is religious: such attachment is described as faith in law, devotion to law, a myth of rights, magical legalism and especially, legal fetishism—the adoration of law as if it were something different from the will of men." Not quite the same meaning as above.
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