This visually rich, experience-led collection explores what design can do for legal education. In recent decades design has increasingly come to be understood as a resource to improve other fields of public, private and civil society practice; and legal design—that is, the application of design-based methods to legal practice—is increasingly embedded in lawyering across the world. It brings together experts from multiple disciplines, professions and jurisdictions to reflect upon how designerly mindsets, processes and strategies can enhance teaching and learning across higher education, public legal information and legal practice; and will be of interest and use to those teaching and learning in any and all of those fields.
1. What can design do for legal education?
Part I: Higher Education
2. Socio-legal methods labs as pedagogical spaces: Experimentation, knowledge building, community development
3. Using personae, vignettes and visual approaches to communicate and interrogate sociolegal concepts, theory and methods
4. Objects and visual devices in teaching for peace: Narrowing the gaps between the languages of social sciences and law
5. Psychologically-Informed Design in Legal Education
6. Service design comes to Blackstone’s tower: Applying design thinking to curriculum development in legal education
7. Teaching innovation in the age of technology: Educating lawyers for digital disruption using visually-oriented legal design principles?
8. Teaching IT Law through the lens of legal design
9. Making a racism reporting tool: A legal design case study
10. Teaching comic book contracting
Part II: Public Legal Education
11. Using human centred design to break down barriers to legal participation
12. Judging by appearances
13. Designing to dismantle
14. Taking our interactive co-design workshop online
15. Designing access to the law: An ethical perspective
Part III: Legal Practice
16. Visualisation in contract education and practice: The first 25 years
17. How Legal Design is shaping satisfaction, standards and substance in legal practice
18. Design in legal publishing
19. Lawyers are still lawyers. Except when they’re not
Biography
Emily Allbon is an Associate Professor at the City Law School (City, University of London). She is known for her work in developing the award-winning Lawbore resource—a website to support and engage those studying law, as well as for her activities in the field of legal design. She was proud to launch TL;DR—the less textual legal gallery in late 2019—which showcases ways of making law more accessible to all. She has worked with charities, law firms and independent organisations too; helping them find better solutions for communicating the law to their clients.
Her work has been recognised via awards both from her previous profession (librarianship and information science) and the academic law community; she was awarded the Routledge/ALT Teaching Law with Technology Prize 2013. In 2013 the Higher Education Academy named her one of 55 National Teaching Fellows—the UK’s most prestigious awards for excellence in higher education teaching and support for learning. She is also a Senior Fellow of the HEA. Her interests lie in legal education, legal research and legal information literacy, student engagement, legal design and visualisation and the use of technology in teaching and learning.
Amanda Perry-Kessaris SFHEA is Professor of Law at Kent Law School where she convenes a unique design-driven postgraduate research methods course, Research Methods in Law. She is author of Doing Sociolegal Research in Design Mode funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Socio-Legal Studies Association and published by Routledge in 2021. She has worked with a wide range of collaborators to use designerly ways to enhance legal thinking and practice in academic and beyond, and is currently working on a project entitled Approaching the Economic Lives of Law in Design Mode to be published in monograph form by Routledge. She blogs at https://amandaperrykessaris. org/approaching-law/ and tweets @amandaperrykessaris
