This chapter focuses on visualising the law, in the form of comics, as a specific way to understand the realm of legal design. Focusing on the case study of Lawtoons, we detail the existing definitional inconsistencies of legal design and advocate for clarity in appreciating the purview of this emerging discipline. The legal design community must have, at its very core, the ability to visualise law to make law available at scale. We also briefly lay the conceptual foundations of visualisation in law and argue that graphics and storytelling are an important way to promote dignity in legal awareness and education.

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.

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.

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.

Legal design could and should be more sociolegal. Sociolegal research can offer conceptual frameworks, empirical methods and data, and normative direction to legal design. At the same time, designerly methods can enhance the abilities of sociolegal researchers to make and communicate a sense of things to, with and for themselves, academics in other disciplines, and the wider world. So, if legal designers were to engage more deeply and systematically with sociolegal research and researchers, benefits could flow to legal design, to cross-disciplinary research, and to the wider world.

This chapter posits that the emerging methods, perspectives, and goals of legal design fit squarely within the history of law. It offers a quick sketch of the history of the development of the rule of law over the last 4,000 years, which sets the stage for an examination of that history as a design history – humanity’s collective work over four millennia of ideating, prototyping, testing, and refining the systems of rules we use to live collectively. It then makes a few points about the benefits of design as design – its relative speed, flexibility, and responsiveness to making things that are useful to people. It will then introduce the concept of “longtermerism,” which refers to a concept or ideology that emphasizes the importance of long-term thinking and decision-making in various aspects of life. The chapter wraps things up with a note of urgency and optimism based on the argument that no human should be denied the benefit of the rule of law.

In this moment for the world, as at any point in history where society faced remarkable changes and worked collectively to overcome them, there is tension between the radical change needed for a just and equitable society for all and the inherent conservatism and slow pace of change in the law, which, we have argued, is a fundamental architecture of society. The convergence of globalism, climate change, and digital technology demands a design approach to problem-solving that considers the interconnected nature of these factors in the planning, and a legal landscape that fosters collaboration for a lasting impact. Many of the strengths of legal design are perfectly matched to the challenges of this moment. We think this volume helps demonstrate that the intersection of the disciplines of law and design holds immense promise for addressing pressing challenges and fostering societal repair.

As legal design, technology, and innovation initiatives proliferate, more academic institutions are developing and launching certificates, concentrations, and full-fledged degree programs focused on legal innovation, design, and related subjects. Parallel to that promising development are the increased calls for the professionalization of legal design. This chapter posits that adopting a guild mentality toward legal design would unwisely curtail the rapid proliferation of this interdisciplinary movement, resulting in fewer practitioners and far less impact in both the short and long term. It proposes instead the embrace of an expansive identification of who is a “legal designer”: any creative soul with an interest in improving our justice system.

Policymakers face many design possibilities when implementing means-adjusted tax compliance rules. This chapter serves as the bridge from theory to legal design. We begin this transition by identifying some of the key design considerations that policymakers should take into account when attempting to introduce means adjustments to the tax compliance rules. In general, we propose means adjustments to certain tax compliance rules that favor high-end taxpayers when they are applied the same to everyone. These adjustments should also be designed to preserve core prerequisites of procedural fairness, and should also include an underpayment-based threshold to exempt less consequential tax offenses from these heightened tax compliance rules.

The use of digital technologies in healthcare is changing how medical treatments are developed by researchers, delivered by medical professionals and experienced by patients. This chapter argues that a defining feature of this disruption is the emergence of medical apps that leverage algorithm-based AI systems. As the use of such apps and AI wearables goes mainstream and new players – notably ‘Super Platforms’ with digital rather than medical expertise – enter the healthcare sector, traditional medical services will be transformed.

These developments pose several challenges for regulators and policymakers, most obviously in terms of privacy and data protection. Here, we examine how the emerging field of Legal Design can provide a more transparent infrastructure that embeds relevant legal protections in the user interfaces of healthcare products and services. A Privacy-by-Design approach focused on the user interface (UI) offers several advantages, most obviously greater transparency, accountability and human choice. The chapter offers real-world examples of design patterns that illustrate the value of UI-focused Privacy-by-Design in protecting sensitive information, enabling people to retain control of their personal data. The chapter concludes with some examples and reflects on the challenges in implementing Legal Design in an eHealth context.

In order to make the concept of social-ecological resilience and resilience governance comprehensible in a legal context the study first established some general governance features that represents the core of resilience governance. These features are the core of what a legal design for social-ecological resilience should reflect. However, law must also safe guard the legal principles and legal characteristics of law and its role as a stable institutional base with binding requirements. The study reviewed both possible matches and potential obstacles where law may not sufficiently reflect resilience governance. However, it also unveiled legal mechanisms that contributes in other ways than expected. All in all, a general conclusion is that law has many important features that matches resilience governance and thus has the potential to form an important basis for resilience governance in many different settings.

Despite the fast development of environmental governance and environmental law over the past decades, the world is facing fundamental threats to the environment and the earth system. Many scholars argue that the world is entering the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch represented by the fact that the earth is now in an unprecedented way shaped by human activities. In addition to reflecting the global scale of the environmental problems, this perspective also emphasizes the complex and intertwined relationship between the human and the natural systems (i.e., the social and the ecological). Research on social-ecological resilience provides a theoretical framework for the governance of such complexity. This governance calls also for new legal approaches and pose significant challenges for legal design. The purpose of this book is to explore the resilience theories and concepts, focusing on their compatibility with international and EU environmental law.

The conclusion draws together the book’s findings and arguments, and elaborates on their historical and normative–legal implications today. It calls for a history of human rights that explores the multiple social and narrative practices through which the human rights discourse has been deployed and sometimes transformed; in other words, it calls for an unabashedly interdisciplinary legal–historical–ethnographic approach to human rights.