Cass Sunstein on Star Wars and Constitutional Law

Legal scholar extraordinaire has a good article on how the creative process for Star Wars resembles the interpretation of the Constitution: messy, path-dependent, and serendipitous. The most amusing quote so far:

When Lucas began, he was not, in fact, writing about “a father and a son, and twins.” In Taylor’s words, “the course of creativity rarely runs smooth” (p. 102). A significant part of Lucas’s start involved an apparently random list of a large number of names, most of which never made it into the movies: Emperor Ford Xerxes the Third; Xenos; Han Solo (“leader of the Hubble people”); Thorpe; Roland; Lars; Kane; Luke Skywalker (“Prince of Bebers”). Lucas apparently had just one scene clear in his mind, a kind of dogfight in outer space, in which ships “would hurtle and tumble around after each other, like World War II fighters, like wild birds” (p. 103).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/29/how-star-wars-explains-constitutional-law/