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

Teaching Comic Book Contracting

by Camilla Andersen

The first semester of the revised 2020 undergraduate capstone unit “Business Law in Practice” on the Business Law major at UWA, saw the inclusion of a challenge on Comic Book Contracting. This challenge was 20% of the curriculum and offered materials, cases, examples and a challenge for the students to design their own unique contract innovation. This chapter explores how the unit was taught, describes some of the unique concepts students came up with in visualising contracts, and looks at selected reflections from students, on how the introduction of the content changed their perceptions of contracts.

Camilla Baasch Andersen is a Professor in the Law School at University of Western Australia. She has previously held academic posts at various prestigious universities word-wide, including University of Leicester, the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary, University of London and University of Copenhagen in her native Denmark. She has lectured and examined externally for many institutions, has worked with the CISG Advisory Council, and been the National Reporter for the United Kingdom for the International Academy of Comparative Law. Prof Andersen holds a doctorate from University of Aarhus, and was the founding co-editor of The Journal of Comparative Law and a Fellow at the Institute of International Commercial Law at Pace Law School, New York. She serves as a Trade Law Expert for UNCITRAL and sits on the UNCITRAL Australian Co-ordination Committee, and works closely with business, government and academia in pursuit of Commercial Law facilitating trade. Her recent research into pro-active law and legal design has seen her serve on the Nordic Pro-Active Think Tank, and since 2017 she has led the pioneering Comic Book Contract team at UWA – see www.comicbookcontract.com . Her extensive publication list includes books, articles and book chapters on numerous topics such as international sales and the CISG, harmonised law, international commerce, pro-active approaches to law, dispute resolution, legal design and comparative commercial law.

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