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

Objects and visual devices in teaching for peace: narrowing the gaps between the languages of social sciences and law

by Ximena Sierra-Camargo

In 2019 and 2020 I was teaching an MA course on Peacebuilding addressed to analyse from a critical perspective the scope and restrictions of peacebuilding policies in post-conflict scenarios. Among the main challenges, I found firstly, that it was an interdisciplinary course addressed to people trained in different disciplines mainly from social sciences and to a few lawyers; and secondly, it was part of one of the first postgraduate programmes in Colombia on peacebuilding after the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC (2016) and various of my students not only had completely opposed political views but some of them played key roles both during the conflict and in the post-agreement scenario. For the purpose to face these challenges and taking into consideration my own background as a human rights lawyer and as a socio-legal scholar, I tried to integrated different methodologies to create a channel between the different students’ languages -in epistemological and methodological terms- and my own scientific language. For this purpose, and inspired in the proposal on design and law by prof. Amanda Perry-Kessaris in the IEL Collective Inaugural Conference 2019, I challenged to my students to represent their final essays using the #PopUpCollection methodology. In this sense, I will refer in this chapter to some of their representations, which based on objects and visual devices created channels able to translate their own scientific languages and understandings of complex discussions on the peacebuilding policies, making them more accessible, and pushing us to reflect on it.

Ximena Sierra-Camargo is a Catalyst Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She holds a doctorate in in law from Rosario University (Colombia) and MA in sociology of law. She was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Critical International Law, Kent Law School (2015 - 2016) and a Visiting Fellow at the Transnational Law Institute, King's College London (2016). Dr. Sierra also has performed as a lecturer in international law, transnational law, development and peace studies. Her research and teaching interests include corporations and human rights, global law and development, postcolonial studies and legal aesthetics.

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