Command Theory, Control and Computing: A Playwright’s Perspective on Alan Turing and the Law

This paper is about how To Kill a Machine, a play written by the article’s author about the life and work of mathematician and cryptanalyst Alan Turing, has inspired legal research into the nature of law. The questions posed by Turing: “what are computable numbers?” and “can machines think?” are reimagined as legal questions concerning the nature of law, law’s assumptions about appropriate behaviour, and a re-evaluation of Austin and Hart’s approaches to the command theory of law.