This book explores how comics, animated series and pop music represent law, reflecting and shaping public perception. It adopts a comparative and international law approach, involving diverse scholars and going beyond Anglo-American culture to enrich the legal debate. This innovative collection fills a crucial gap in both legal and cultural studies.

While there is an established tradition in this field within Anglo-Saxon academic contexts, in continental Europe, works like those included in this volume remain relatively rare.

This book is the product of a long journey that began before the pandemic and continued with virtual and in-person seminars that allowed us to gather a group of scholars interested in how the relationship between law and justice is represented in comics and other pop culture products.

Over recent years, we have been organising an annual event that explores the intersection of law and pop culture. These events are primarily aimed at an academic audience but remain open to others. They bring together lawyers and non-lawyers – such as media sociologists and political philosophers – to examine the relationship between law and morality within various fictional worlds. The inaugural sessions featured Batman and Daredevil as focal points.

Inspired by the positive reception and media interest these events generated, the STALS research group (Sant’Anna Legal Studies) hosted an online event titled Law, Justice, and Pop Culture: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. This full-day event, which can be viewed on the STALS YouTube channel, brought together diverse perspectives on the topic. Building on this momentum, we proposed to the Italian Society of Comparative and European Public Law (Diritto pubblico comparato ed europeo) that its annual conference, held in the Department of Law of the University of Foggia, should focus on the representation of legal traditions in pop culture. The call for papers, issued in Italian, attracted significant interest and culminated in a nearly 800-page volume edited by us, Aldo Ligustro and Rolando Tarchi.

Encouraged by the success of these initiatives, our STALS team – together with Paolo Addis and Luca Gori – decided to extend this project to high schools. We organised a series of lectures in Lucca, home to the renowned Lucca Comics & Games festival, Europe's largest comic and gaming convention. This initiative was carried out in partnership with the Centro Maria Eletta Martini, Fondazione per la Coesione Sociale Onlus and Lucca Crea.