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

Using human-centred design to break down barriers to legal participation

by Gráinne McKeever, Lucy Royal-Dawson

This chapter examines the use of human centred design as a mechanism to overcome two central barriers to legal participation faced by people who go to court without a lawyer: the practical barrier of not having access to public legal education on what court proceedings involve and the attitudinal barrier that sees litigants in person as a burden on the court system. The use of human centred design is explored as a means of providing much needed public legal information, with a particular focus on how the experience of human centred design can impact on the attitudes of lawyers, litigants and other court actors.

Gráinne McKeever is a Professor of Law and Social Justice and Co-Director of the Ulster University Law Clinic. Her research focuses on the state’s duty to protect the rights of citizens, examining how individual citizens access their legal entitlements, particularly those who experience difficulties in accessing state systems of support. She is the Joint Editor for the Journal of Social Security Law, a member of the Social Security Advisory Committee, a member of the academic panel advising the UK Administrative Justice Council, and a former Chair and Executive Director of Law Centre (Northern Ireland).

Dr Lucy Royal-Dawson is a Research Associate on the project ‘Understanding and Supporting Legal Participation of Litigants in Person’ at Ulster University’s School of Law. Improving the support available to personal litigants in Northern Ireland was a recommendation from the study’s first phase ‘The impact of Litigants in Person on the Northern Ireland court system: a human rights analysis,’ on which she also worked. Her interest in social justice issues evolved from 25 years in educational management in conflict and post-conflict countries, including the occupied Palestinian Territories, Liberia and Cambodia, and in UK educational assessment.

Go back