Introduction

Summary

This book is an introduction to the new field of legal design and a primer on both the application and theory of legal design that has developed so far in a decade of exploration and experimentation. We have assembled case studies of pioneering efforts from around the world, collected examples of methods and perspectives just now coming into focus, and offer a handful of proscriptions for the future. Bookending those three subject areas are both individual and collective articulations of these editors’ frames of reference and influence in our work together—dignity, law, and radical imagination. Our collective frame for this volume is relentlessly optimistic. We believe that the new field of legal design provides a promising intervention for challenging the harmful systems, structures, methodologies and outcomes that currently define legal systems, and designing systems that actually embody and effectuate the full promise of the rule of law – a just, peaceful, and equitable world for everyone.