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 IT law through the lens of (legal) design

by Rossana Ducato, Alain Strowel

The intersection between law and design is a growing research field, especially in highly innovative sectors related to information technologies. On the one hand, the law is called to regulate emerging technologies, so that the latter are designed, since their early development, in a way that embeds the legal principles. Design methodology can contribute to shaping the technical artefacts according to the legal rationale but, on the other hand, can help lawyers to discover new legal (and extra-legal) solutions and pathways to test.

The interdisciplinary dialogue between law and design, which is more and more common in legal research and practice, is nevertheless lacking in traditional law curricula. With the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet Module “European IT Law by Design”, introduced at the UCLouvain in 2018/2019, we have contributed to addressing such a gap, transferring the research experience gained in the field of legal design into the teaching of IT Law. This piece will present the course's structure, goals, and learning outcomes, offering an overview of the strategies and tools that might provide insights into building interdisciplinary courses at the crossroad of law and design.

Rossana Ducato is Lecturer of IT Law and Regulation at the University of Aberdeen, School of Law. She is also research fellow at the UCLouvain Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire Droit Entreprise et Société (CRIDES), where she is Module leader of the Erasmus+ Jean Monnet course « European IT Law by Design ».
Her research interests are always pursued in a comparative vein and range from Privacy and Data Protection to Consumer protection, Intellectual Property Law, and Law and Design, with a special focus on the problems related to new technologies and their impact on society.
She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles and chapters in scholarly books about issues related to law and technology with particular attention to the platform economy, Big and Open Data, cloud computing, drones, research biobanks, and health information technologies.

 

Webpage: https://www.abdn.ac.uk/law/people/profiles/rossana.ducato

Twitter: @RossanaDucato

Alain Strowel is professor at the UCLouvain and at the University Saint-Louis, Brussels where he teaches courses in intellectual property, IT and media law. He also gives a course in the advanced master in intellectual property and IT law at the Munich IP Law Center. In 2020-2021, he is fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (Berlin).

Alain is avocat at the Brussels bar since 1988, now with the firm Pierstone. He is an arbiter for the WIPO and “.be” domain names dispute resolution systems. He has been elected to the Academia Europaea in 2012. Since 2019, he chairs the Intellectual Property working group of All European Academies (ALLEA) to which he contributed since 2012.

Alain graduated in law, economics and philosophy at the UCLouvain and the University of Amsterdam. He holds a PhD in Law from UCLouvain. Today his research focuses on data governance, Artificial Intelligence and the regulation of online platforms.

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