Legal design » Definitions

Collecting sources and resources discussing a variety of perspectives on “legal design”.

“What is legal design” discussions

The essential question of defining legal design regularly pops up in introductory talks or podcasts. Some nuanced and insightful such discussions can be found here:

Legal Design Pioneers by SKYE Contracts - Future Series • A podcast on Anchor anchor.fm

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This podcast episode, hosted by Carol Hannud, is a comprehensive and very personal intro into legal design, told by four pioneers of the discipline — through the lens of how they ended up working in this field and how they look at it […]

Also some individual ambassadors of legal design have appeared in interviews and articles:

Arianna Rossi: « legal design offers a human-centered perspective to the law » linc.cnil.fr

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In this interview, Arianna Rossi summarizes her definition of “legal design” as

[…] an interdisciplinary approach that promotes human-centered design to prevent or solve legal problems, by prioritizing the point of views of all the users of law.

She highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the discipline, the preventive approach (avoiding legal risk by good design), and the broad audiences far beyond legal practitioners […]

Academic papers and publications

For a thorough academic deep dive, this source is a good starting point:

Design Issues – Special Issue: The Rise of Legal Design direct.mit.edu

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An entire special issue of Design Issues dedicated to legal design as an emerging discipline! This (paywalled) journal contains a whole range of articles with perspectives on #legal design […]