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16 - Building Technology with(out) People

from III - How Legal Design Works

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 December 2024

By
Steven Geofrey
Edited by
Miso Kim ,
Dan Jackson  and
Jules Rochielle Sievert
Miso Kim
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
Dan Jackson
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
Jules Rochielle Sievert
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

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.

Keywords

value senstive designdigital technologylegal educationtechno-solutionist
Type
Chapter
Information
Legal Design
Dignifying People in Legal Systems
 , pp. 251 - 263
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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