Design in Legal Education

A visually rich, experience-led collection
exploring what design can do for legal education.

A visually rich, experience-led collection exploring 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. Today legal design – that is, the application of design-based methods to legal practice – is increasingly embedded in lawyering across the world.

This new publication 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. It will be of interest and use to those teaching and learning in any and all of those fields.

A conversation between the editors

Emily Allbon

Emily Allbon

Associate Professor of Law
City Law School
Amanda Perry-Kessaris

Amanda Perry-Kessaris

Professor of Law
Kent Law School

Explore the chapters

Socio-legal methods labs as pedagogical spaces: experimentation, knowledge building, community development

by Siddharth Peter de Souza, Lisa Hahn

This chapter explores how socio-legal studies can be brought alive and enhanced through the deployment of a lab which functions as a space for interactive learning. We discuss how it is possible to build a more experiential way of learning with a mixture of literature, visualisations and games to make socio-legal methods more approachable as well as closely connected to law in action. We will look at tools and strategies to enable students to practice and work through strands of socio-legal theory, methods and science communication in a reflexive, application-oriented and didactically creative way. The chapter thereby responds to the needs of emerging researchers, who face multiple challenges when designing and actually conducting an empirical research project at the intersection of law and other disciplines.

Siddharth Peter de Souza is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Global Data Justice project, Tilburg University  where he works on community centered approaches to data governance. He is co-founder of the Socio-Legal Lab and has studied law at Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Cambridge, and at the University of Delhi. He previously worked as a German Chancellor Fellow at the Max Planck Foundation for International Peace and Rule of Law, Heidelberg and as a Judicial Clerk at the High Court of Delhi. Siddharth is the founder of Justice Adda, a legal design social venture in India, and a researcher at FemLab.Co.

Lisa Hahn, is a Ph.D. Candidate at Humboldt University Berlin (Germany). Her socio-legal dissertation explores access to justice through strategic litigation. She is a fellow of the Forschungsstelle Kultur- und Kollektivwissenschaft (Regensburg) and was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Law & Society (UC Berkeley). She is a co-founder of the Socio-Legal Lab and speaker of the project group of the Integrated Research Institute “Law & Society” (HU Berlin). Lisa is a lawyer by training but was familiarized with socio-legal research methods in through her work in interdisciplinary projects on migration and administrative law and on enforcing anti-discrimination law.

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