Prologue: Writings on a wall

Can digital miracles be formalized? What sort of effects does formalization have on the performance of digital miracles? The migration of our dominant written culture onto social media is enabling the digital codification of existing bodies of miraculous cures, allowing them to take on network-like expressions. This digital codification through the written word is an instance of the formalization of digital record-keeping and record-making within the structuring and formatting of social media data architecture. The digitality of writing lends itself to a swathe of computational manipulation, which has been developed both in response to and as a historical result of late 20th-century computationalism. By examining this digitality firstly through a historical lens and subsequently using the tools that have been developed as part of our computational zeitgeist, we can begin to examine how written networks of miracle cures on social media might differ from – or resemble – pre-digital organizations and enactments of miracles.

The goal of this chapter is to raise awareness for legal design evaluation, introduce existing theoretical frameworks in evaluation that can be used as templates for legal design evaluations, and recommend the next steps. It will provide strategies for defining and utilizing mixed methods data, quantitative data, and qualitative data. This chapter outlines the human-centered value and intended uses of Trauma-Informed Evaluation and Culturally Responsive Evaluation (CRE) and conclude with proposed suggestions for further efforts in legal design evaluations.

This chapter details the tenacious efforts to bring dignity and justice to domestic workers in Massachusetts, culminating in the passage of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights of 2014. Natalicia R. Tracy, who led the Brazilian Workers’ Center’s efforts to pass the law, provides us with a front-line view of this particular national workers’ rights movement, how it manifested in Massachusetts, and how her organization partnered with artists and designers to place workers’ dignity at the center of the successful organizing strategy.

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.

The Legal Design Lab is an interdisciplinary team based at Stanford Law School and d.school, which does exploratory design work and empirical research to reimagine how the legal system could work. They seek to build a new generation of legal products and services. This team uses human-centered design and agile development methodology to design new solutions for legal services. This chapter explores the value of interdisciplinary pedagogies in legal education and methods that are taught, with a focus on how design students can grow their ideas and innovation by engaging with legal actors and institutions.

Design is integral to every part of our justice system: from the built spaces like courtrooms and the clerk’s office counter, to the paper and digital forms litigants submit, to the rules of procedure themselves. This chapter argues that good architectural design can make our justice system more just by enhancing participants’ sense of fairness and dignity, and more efficient by contributing to mindsets from which it is easier for parties to resolve conflict. We begin by discussing historical inspirations and manifestations of courtroom and courthouse design. We then look at some of the key stakeholders who make design decisions before highlighting a few modern efforts to use design to bring dignity to patrons of courthouses. We illustrate our position by referencing a 2018 collaboration among a graduate architecture studio course at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Northeastern University School of Law’s NuLawLab, and Massachusetts Housing Court in which architecture and law students and faculty tackled spatial interventions in Boston Housing Court.

This chapter will examine ideas of dignity in the context of proceedings in the Canadian civil justice system with a focus on the role judges can and do play in furthering or degrading notions of dignity in the courtroom. It details the rise of no representation in civil courts and the challenge and trauma that individuals experience throughout the de-dignifying process. It then offers some thoughts on dignity as a concept within the world of self-representation, before detailing the role of the judge in these cases, and the impact different judicial approaches have on litigants without lawyers. It closes by offering proposed reforms to procedures, administration, and the adjudicator’s role that would enhance the dignity of people moving through court systems without the help of a lawyer.

In the last chapter, we have seen how livestreaming technologies transform downtime and enable alternative temporal spaces, allowing social practices that are shunned by the temporal structures of institution and society to retune and continue to thrive at the margin of these structures and at the centre of the everyday. At the heart of this transformation is the collective experience of the internet as a space – as well as the playful nature of this experience. Spatial language infuses the way in which the internet is discussed in popular culture. From the famous adage ‘On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog’ (Steiner, 1993), to allusions to ‘cyberspace’, ‘online world’, and ‘global village’, the internet is often understood as a place that is at once disembodied and yet spatially capable of bringing the world together (Graham, 2013). One goes ‘on’ the internet and ‘to’ a website in the English lexicon, as Graham (2013) points out, as if there is a singular virtual place equally accessible to all. Vernacular equivalents of the grammatical rules associated with the internet in the English language can also be found in Vietnamese – one goes ‘up’ or ‘onto’ the internet (‘lên’ mạng) or ‘into’ a website (‘vào’ web). As a space, the internet enables ‘free flows of information’ and is host to ‘online communities’. These spatial elaborations of the internet often go unexamined as they structure, condition, and constrain conceptualizations and thus computer-mediated practices, as well as producing novel experiences of place.

While the internet as a space lacks apparent coherence and closure, it is nevertheless seen as stationary and mapped out from the user-infrastructure perspective: even though the internet is a little different every time we refresh our newsfeed, click on a link, or livestream a video, there is a finite set of tasks that users can execute and manipulate when they are online. As such, activities on the internet take on an ontic role; this ontic role informs the notion that internet problems require internet-specific solutions – a discourse easily misconstrued as separate from problems and solutions that are ‘social’, ‘cultural’, or ‘political’.

This demarcation between technology and society is prominent in the framing of the mis/ disinformation problem (Hwang, 2020). Although digital mis/ disinformation hardly exists independently of the material technology that constitutes it, there appears to be a bifurcation of information as abstraction and technology as milieu.

Balancing individual autonomy and collective action is crucial in promoting dignity in participatory policy processes, particularly within urban policymaking. This chapter presents a case study of Lancaster City Council’s efforts to redesign the deteriorating “Mainway” housing estate, home to approximately 500 diverse inhabitants, within a dignified, inclusive framework. The project required devising a participatory process that effectively solicited input from all community members, including both regular meeting attendees and those sceptical of authority or unable to leave their flats due to health concerns. Amidst these complexities and COVID-19 restrictions, the My Mainway initiative was born. This ongoing initiative aims to transform the challenged estate through a £35 million urban regeneration project. Using a dignity-focused legal design framework, we examine how such an intricate process can facilitate dignified participation, ensuring a fair, respectful platform and offering advocacy for the seldom heard in community decisions.

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.

As its name indicates, algorithmic regulation relies on the automation of regulatory processes through algorithms. Examining the impact of algorithmic regulation on the rule of law hence first requires an understanding of how algorithms work. In this chapter, I therefore start by focusing on the technical aspects of algorithmic systems (Section 2.1), and complement this discussion with an overview of their societal impact, emphasising their societal embeddedness and the consequences thereof (Section 2.2). Next, I examine how and why public authorities rely on algorithmic systems to inform and take administrative acts, with special attention to the historical adoption of such systems, and their impact on the role of discretion (Section 2.3). Finally, I draw some conclusions for subsequent chapters (Section 2.4).