In this chapter, we discuss how the design and evolution of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth elevated respect for the lived experience of queer youth in setting policies that impact their lives. Originally founded in 1992, the Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was formed to respond to high suicide risk among gay and lesbian youth in the Commonwealth. That original Commission transformed in 2006 into an independent state agency established by law. Today, the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth advises others in state government on effective policies, programs, and resources for LGBTQ youth and produces the Safe Schools Program with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This chapter details the experience of artist and legal designer Alexander (Alex) Nally, who led agency and government relations on the Commission for five years, and focuses on how human-centered design approaches can improve policy interventions.

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.

Using Northeastern University School of Law’s Domestic Violence Institute’s (DVI) virtual clinic as a case study, this chapter contends that service design methods can address systemic and pernicious access to justice issues that have a chilling effect on survivors seeking legal services. It details foundational information about domestic violence survivors and the work of the clinic pre-COVID-19, before detailing the danger, disruption, and delays that the public health measures and Court closures had on survivors’ lives. It then details the process and outcomes of a rapid-response service design intervention that quickly overhauled DVI’s operations and created a survivor-centered framework that remains in place today, tackling systemic and pernicious access to justice issues while simultaneously amplifying the voices, experiences, and needs of survivors.

The naming of things matters. What we decide to call a thing, however arbitrarily, does not merely provide us with a convenient point of reference for that thing; the act of naming enlists the empirical subject in a web of meanings that both precedes it and is produced by it. Calling a range of therapeutic modalities ‘complementary’ and ‘alternative’ has the effect of clarifying and solidifying what it means to be ‘scientific’, while at the same time alienating and marginalizing what lies outside of this scientific framework. Once a naming convention has become stabilized, the semantic network built around this name is anything but arbitrary. Once we have decided that a medicine is ‘unorthodox’ or ‘traditional’, for example, it is less straightforward to associate it with things like ‘rigour’, ‘efficacy’, or ‘government funding’. Names represent the empirical object as they designate general qualities and substances that sustain the possibility of discourse about that object; it is through this discursivity of language that the construction of knowledge becomes possible. Names as signifiers, similar to all of language, are not always perfect; their imperfections and errors, however, record what has been learned and allow for the progression of knowledge through judgement of what is being proposed, articulated, and derived from naming conventions.

Some naming activities are more formal and formalized than others. The naming of specialties within scientific medicine, for example, has grown increasingly systematic and narrowly focused. The General Medical Council (GMC) in the UK records more than 65 specialties and 31 sub-specialties in formal biomedical pedagogy; the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) records more than 160 specialties and subspecialties, while the Medical Board of Australia (MBA) recognizes over 80 scientific medical specialties and fields of specialty practice (MBA, 2018; AAMC, 2023; GMC, 2023). The naming of specialities inevitably informs practice; by the mid-1950s, medical specialization had become a fundamental characteristic of biomedicine (Weisz, 2006). At the same time, the naming of non-Western, non-scientific therapeutic modalities in scholarly literature proliferates in a much less systematic manner. This contrast is not incidental; it is the result of a structural reordering of medical epistemology at the dawn of clinical sciences.

Using a network approach, this chapter analyzes the naming conventions in scholarly knowledge produced about the therapeutic knowledge and practices that precede and persist alongside biomedical knowledge.

That miracle cures became inscribed – that is, committed to space – turned out to be a transformative development. When Tuệ Tĩnh composed Nam Dược Thần Hiệu [Miraculous Drugs of the South] in Chinese script while living in exile in China, he ended up producing a text that is a blend of a herbal handbook and a pragmatic guide (see Chapter 2). Commonly understood as Tuệ Tĩnh's effort to elucidate Vietnamese medicine to his host country, Nam Dược Thần Hiệu was the first text to systematize the use of Vietnamese medicaments within the parameters of Chinese drug theory, so that ‘Southern’ medicine could be presented to physicians at the Ming court. By way of inscription, miracle cures became subject to decontextualization. By isolating miracle cures from the broader context in which they originally appeared and attempting to abstract away principles about the miracles of the South towards a more generalized and theoretical understanding, Tuệ Tĩnh had mobilized an analytical mindset made possible by a culture of literacy which, in 14th-century Vietnam, was populated by the educated elite. The written form is abstracted from matter and in need of explication; they are residues of what has been called ‘context-free’ language (Hirsch, 1977, p 21) or ‘autonomous’ discourse (Olson, 1980, p 187). Writing has since the beginning enhanced the primary orality of language, enabling not only the organization of principles of oratory, but also giving rise to the written composition, which further cemented the importance of the analytical mindset – which is intent on pulling things apart, breaking down the dense continuum of experience, and processing information in meaningful segments (Ong, 2002).

Inscription also makes miracle cures portable, even if not contextually transferrable. Copies of ‘Nam Dược Thần Hiệu’ were sent back to Vietnam via a diplomatic mission and were kept in the Vietnamese royal libraries prior to the Ming invasion in 1407, even as they were produced for the benefit of the Ming court (see Chapter 2). The fixation of miracle cures on paper was made in assistance of military conquest and colonization; even when Tuệ Tĩnh foregrounded a physical and spiritual relationship between Vietnamese people and the land where they live (‘Vietnamese medicine for Vietnamese people’), the inscription of miracle cures was meant to assist the Ming with overcoming the ‘miasmic climate’ of Vietnam as a ‘deadly barrier’ that set limits for military garrisons and Han settlements.

Appendix 2: Summary Statistics for the Interpretation of a Topic

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.

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.