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.

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.

Prologue: Embodying the digital

Our bodily activities are increasingly directly connected to the use of technological devices, as we carry our laptops, phones, and other electronic items throughout the day: we rely on these devices to communicate, socialize, stay productive, and, as we will see in the following chapters, enact miracles. We no longer use digital technologies simply to communicate, as the previous section has dissected; as we engage with these technologies beyond textual modes, our bodily performance in the digital milieu becomes richly entwined in the dynamic technological affordances that are already embedded in distinct cultural contexts and collective habits. What does it mean to perform digital miracles? What are the sociotechnical conditions that make digital miracles possible?

The ease with which digital images can be produced with digital devices has transformed the social mode of photography and videography from a fixed position of being gazed at and consumed to a dynamic visual practice that is intended to be shared, discussed, and revisited. This transformation not only changes the language of vernacular image-making, but also the very conditions of possibility of creative, spiritual, and miraculous pursuits. Because taking photos and videos has become routine and mundane practice thanks to increasingly ubiquitous availability of devices and internet access, it is to the level of the everyday that we should now turn our attention. In this section, we will interrogate the conditions of possibility for living with digital miracles through a complex digital mode of engagement: that of platform livestreaming.

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.

Prologue: Miracles before the digital

Miracle cures differ greatly across time and context. What all miracle cures share, however, is their being unusual and unexpected from the perspective of empirical scientific knowledge – where an effect is said to have happened despite the absence of an acceptable cause. The miracle cure is both an in vivo concept in vernacular language and a theoretical category that travels far beyond their situated meanings. In Vietnam, the notion of the miracle cure (thần dược) is historically tied not to a Christian divine intervention tradition, but rather to the miraculous healing effects of much of the everyday garden and jungle herbs and plants. By recasting miracle cures as non-biomedical modalities, whose processes of producing, propagating, and living are historical and ongoing, we can begin to discern the limits of the misinformation paradigm and interrogate these modalities as both mediated and material.

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.

What constitutes an appropriate site for empirical research? A research site limits what can be feasibly studied, especially given constraints on time and resources, and shapes the usefulness of the empirical work in relation to other past and future research. Yet research sites are not naturally occurring, ready-made fields of events that are easily accessible to researchers. Morita (2020) remarks that growing interest in the multiplicity of knowledge practices in the non-West has illuminated complex arrangements of difference that require new vocabulary beyond that of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as autonomous entities. In imagining multiplicity, researchers make the movements and connections that explain not a world that exists ‘out there’, but rather problematize problem spaces in which a situation becomes a problem as it recursively refers to descriptions of itself.

As such, Vietnam as a country, a culture, a society is not a self-evident social context in which researchers can readily ‘immerse’ or unproblematically interrogate. What makes Vietnam appropriate as a research site is through the ongoing enactments of shared identity, common meaning, and bounded sovereignty that can be traced and assembled. Vietnam is both a site and a case insofar as it is well-circumscribed enough to not hide its locality while offering itself as points of contrast, reference, or comparison for other sites and situations. The locale of this book is local, albeit dispersed; while it seeks to do away with scholarly formats that carry universalistic pretentions, it is worth reiterating that the point is not to favour localism over universalism. A carefully studied case allows us to unravel what remains the same and what changes from one situation to the next, and thus informs findings that are particular to situations and findings that are not.

In circumscribing a case study as an ongoing enactment of sociality, we are preparing ourselves to attend to events that may disrupt and unfasten any preconceived notion about social relations. In doing this, we should also be open to the possibility of being taken by the actors involved to unfamiliar territories. What is at stake here is not only the changed ‘cosmos’ of social realities before and after experiences of illness as disruptive bodily events, but also the transnational social relations being mediatized by technologies – that which renders Vietnam as multiple, beyond its geographic sovereignty.

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!