Fictional worlds offer rich laboratories for examining how constitutional ideas travel beyond formal legal discourse. The Warhammer 40k universe, with its thick layers of political, cultural, linguistic, and legal references, presents an exceptionally rich example. The Warhammer routinely deploys recognisable constitutional concepts, yet it reconfigures them to suit narrative, aesthetic, and world-building imperatives. It shapes how fans encounter and interpret these concepts, often providing simplified, exaggerated, or morally heightened versions of real-world debates. Warhammer community, in turn, actively engages with the Warhammer fictional constitutional orders: it debates legitimacy, authority, institutional design, and constitutional failure within the terms set by the fictional world, while simultaneously projecting these discussions back onto real-world constitutional imaginaries.

The seminar explores the possibilities of combining insights from fan studies, constitutional theory, and cultural sociology to understand how fictional universes use cultural phenomena to build in-world legitimacy narratives and how these narratives are then reinterpreted by fans, influencing their perceptions of the legitimacy of real-world constitutional systems.

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Lukáš Lev Červinka is a researcher at Charles University (Czechia) and UCD (Ireland), and also serves as the academic coordinator of the Centre for Constitutionalism and Human Rights at Charles University. He is focusing on how the state shapes collective identities within society and on which cultural narratives serve as frameworks for constitutional legitimacy. In his research, he is combining socio-legal and law & humanities approaches.