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.

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.

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.

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.