In this chapter, we introduce the NuLawLab’s pedagogical activities and how dignity has played out in the classroom and experiential learning as a method, core value, and outcome. This chapter details the role of the laboratory model in making the connection between real-world problems and legal education, and the NuLawLab’s application of that concept, which focuses on actively and explicitly making connections among scholarship, community projects, and classrooms. To further our work in teaching legal design, we strive to keep our teaching strategies straightforward and accessible, making legal design available to a broader range of students. We’re determined to explore every avenue to expand legal design’s reach and integration into legal education. We aim to collaborate across institutions to elevate the entire field and establish a more innovative legal design community. These goals align with our commitment to fostering a more inclusive, diverse, and inventive legal design community that empowers students to address the intricate challenges of the legal system.

The Open Law Lab blog was one of the first concerted efforts to articulate the promise for design in the legal space. This chapter details the work of legal design pioneer Margaret Hagan, with a particular emphasis on the challenges legal design academics face in securing respect for design methods from faculty of US law schools. It proposes that, by combining pedagogical innovation with rigorous evaluation of law and design student learning outcomes, legal design can claim its place at the forefront of academic innovation.

Movement lawyers deploy law strategically to change culture, systems, and power. We work with community organizers to weave litigation, education, media, policy, and protest into coordinated campaigns, and together we transcend the limitations of what can be achieved in the courts. Guided by values of dignity, collectivity, and creativity, this unique theory of change calls on the lawyer to be innovative and use law strategically as one of many tools to build the power of marginalized people to win change. Thus, we see legal design as a versatile and valuable tactic that has the potential to build power when combined with community organizing. To make this case, we share our experiences deploying legal design in collaboration with organized communities in Miami and how we used this tool to increase the dignity of the communities we work with, create political space to advance progressive demands, and allow for cross-pollination across disciplines and sectors to arrive at strategic and long-term solutions. We also share some of our wisdom and reflections on the challenges and limitations of using legal design to build people power and contextualize this tool among a range of others.

This chapter offers insights, stories, reflections, and practical examples of hope amid turbulent times. Given the constant need to reimagine our social-legal systems and teach new legal education strategies, we must codesign solutions with movement leaders and other advocates working to shift narratives and power structures in the legal system. As we seek to reimagine our world within the framework of health, equity, healing, human rights, and transformative justice, we must find new methods to develop students’ imaginations and build strategies to reimagine our social-legal systems in educational institutions. By codesigning solutions with movement leaders and other advocates, we can work to shift narratives and power structures in the legal system and beyond.

This chapter advocates for dignity to be the purpose, the lodestar, of contracting. By considering contracts through the lens of dignity, lawyers and designers can help prevent injustice and the indignity of people’s encounters with contracts that are not designed to be understood. Designing contracts for dignity is about enhancing the capacity and capability of the weaker, subordinate, or vulnerable party to autonomously understand their rights and obligations. Autonomy is an essential element common to both contracts and dignity. By enhancing the autonomy of vulnerable parties, the dignity of those vulnerable people is better served, and the assumptions that underpin the law of contracting are validated.

As the practice of law increasingly deploys digital technology to deliver services and information, more law schools are including instruction in technical skills. The prospect of more lawyers with digital expertise renders salient a potentially overlooked imperative: that instruction in technical skills must be paired with the development of a critical orientation toward those skills that interrogates how the techno-solutionist values exist in tension with legal values of human agency and dignity. This chapter examines the cautions of skills-forward approaches to incorporating technology into law pedagogy and practice, arguing that developing a sensitivity toward the social, economic, and political contexts in which technology is produced is essential to ensuring such expertise is applied in ways that continuously improve the quality of encounters with the law, rather than simply reproduce them in digital terms. Coupling technical instruction with critical approaches to technology can prepare professionals not only to design novel digital solutions in law practice but also to fundamentally improve legal institutions and programs through the design of technology.

In this chapter, I introduce philosophical conceptions of dignity and how the framework can serve as the foundation for the interdisciplinary collaboration between design and law as a way to promote human and social values. I further highlight the significance of dignity by providing problematic examples in the intersection of design and law. I propose that there is a need to investigate the moral principles underlying human-centered design in collaboration with law. Together, design and law will contribute to the development of service systems that can improve dignity in citizens’ everyday lives and create positive and real changes in the world.

By looking to the role of legal education as a site of socialization, this chapter joins fellow critical scholarships in analyzing law schools as both remnants and conduits of harmful design methodologies. Dignity, as a principle of community sovereignty and self-determination, has been antithetical to the legal profession’s practices of gatekeeping and remains systematically absent from the infrastructure of legal education. Legal design provides a promising point of intervention for disrupting these violent methodologies – if law schools will allow it. In acknowledging the position of law students as inheritors to legacies of legal harm, this chapter makes an urgent call for centralizing law students in the legal profession’s reimagining of service design models. Through practices of resistance, repair, and responsiveness, law student engagement with the broader critical design movement is necessary for realizing a human-centered legal profession and a future predicated on the intrinsic dignity of all.

This chapter explores the design of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) permanent premises and the politics of movement on its grounds. Drawing on literature in the field of critical international criminal law, law and architecture, legal design, and feminist courtroom geography, the chapter rethinks how the architecture of this particular international court is in constant conversation with its surroundings and its visitors, and how it is entangled with questions of international (criminal) law’s legitimacy and its appeal to humanity, dignity, truth, and justice. My starting point is the constant tension between inclusion and exclusion already inherently present in the design concept of Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects, who aimed to design a building that was to be “a landmark that conveys the eminence and authority of the ICC, while at the same time relating on a human scale." By providing a deeper understanding of the politics of design at the ICC’s permanent premises, this chapter aims to contribute to an interdisciplinary conversation on international law’s opportunities, challenges, and possible alternatives.

This chapter details the early phenomenon that was ReInvent Law—an aggressive injection of innovation and creativity into the legal profession and legal education. Propelled by the 2008 financial crisis and the slow-rolling legal industry and education crisis that followed, ReInvent Law brought together thought leaders from around the world for rapid lightning talks at well-produced convenings that were coupled with a savvy and successful viral social media campaign. With the early emergence of legal design coinciding with ReInvent Law’s run, the synergies and ongoing impact are revealed here by one of ReInvent Law’s founders.

This edited volume arises from an important, even revolutionary, insight: both legal institutions and law itself are products of deliberate design decisions. By critiquing law’s design, legal designers open up the possibility of alternative approaches to problem-solving for individuals and communities. One strength of legal design as it stands today is its breadth, with relevance to every interaction with law and legal institutions. Legal design crosses boundaries of all sorts, from the international to the hyper-local, constitutional to regulatory law, and litigation to drafting. It even offers opportunities to envision entirely new models for mediating between individuals and society that do not rely on existing conceptions of the rule of law. The contributors to this pathbreaking, agenda-setting volume are the dreamers and doers of the legal design movement. Welcome to the revolution!

The growing field of legal design has largely adopted a design-thinking approach. Whilst this has improved efficiency and usability within legal systems, it has insufficiently addressed its systemic issues and in some cases has further entrenched such issues. Critical Design opposes the affirmative approach of design-thinking; it uses design as a method for finding and expanding problems rather than solving them quickly and discreetly. A Critical Design perspective applied to legal issues has the potential to more fundamentally interrogate systemic legal issues, which is necessary for creating a fairer legal system. The project James v Birnmann illustrates the capacity for Critical Design to contend with legal issues. Through utilising popular aesthetics and media, James v Birnmann engages the public with the negative impacts of the growing mediatisation of courtroom trials and the use of AI within legal processes. Challenging the public’s perception of law in this way is a useful step towards legal reform in-unto-itself, whilst this problem-finding approach could also work alongside and enrich the more solution-driven legal design as it is currently practised.

This chapter details ten years of the methods we have deployed in the NuLawLab’s project work with community members, organizations, and legal entities. We begin by examining our approach to interdisciplinary collaboration as it has evolved over time, followed by detailing one such partnership, Stable Ground. We next tackle aspects of participatory collaborative design by examining how we created our RePresent games. The third suite of methods we detail is service design and how we used those concepts to aid survivors of domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. We close by distilling each experience into a handful of takeaways that we hope will prove useful to other legal designers as they consider applying these methods in their work.

In this chapter, we discuss how the design and evolution of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth elevated respect for the lived experience of queer youth in setting policies that impact their lives. Originally founded in 1992, the Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was formed to respond to high suicide risk among gay and lesbian youth in the Commonwealth. That original Commission transformed in 2006 into an independent state agency established by law. Today, the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth advises others in state government on effective policies, programs, and resources for LGBTQ youth and produces the Safe Schools Program with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This chapter details the experience of artist and legal designer Alexander (Alex) Nally, who led agency and government relations on the Commission for five years, and focuses on how human-centered design approaches can improve policy interventions.

This chapter examines the emerging field of legal design through a critical reflection on the literature on academic disciplines and disciplinarity and argues that legal design does meet the criteria for recognition as an emerging academic subdiscipline. Its central contention is that legal design academics (together with their collaborative partners) have a timely opportunity to intentionally design the modalities of their nascent discipline. Academic disciplines can be understood in various ways. Whether this is, for example, from a sociological or an anthropological perspective, legal design has the chance to examine the human experience of disciplinarity and to consciously build an academic discipline that promotes dignity and value for its users, be they academic practitioners, students, or wider professional communities.