In this chapter, we discuss how the design and evolution of the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth elevated respect for the lived experience of queer youth in setting policies that impact their lives. Originally founded in 1992, the Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was formed to respond to high suicide risk among gay and lesbian youth in the Commonwealth. That original Commission transformed in 2006 into an independent state agency established by law. Today, the Commission on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Questioning (LGBTQ) Youth advises others in state government on effective policies, programs, and resources for LGBTQ youth and produces the Safe Schools Program with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. This chapter details the experience of artist and legal designer Alexander (Alex) Nally, who led agency and government relations on the Commission for five years, and focuses on how human-centered design approaches can improve policy interventions.

The Legal Design Lab is an interdisciplinary team based at Stanford Law School and d.school, which does exploratory design work and empirical research to reimagine how the legal system could work. They seek to build a new generation of legal products and services. This team uses human-centered design and agile development methodology to design new solutions for legal services. This chapter explores the value of interdisciplinary pedagogies in legal education and methods that are taught, with a focus on how design students can grow their ideas and innovation by engaging with legal actors and institutions.

Chapter 7 analyses the legal challenges that incorporation of AI-systems in the Automated State will bring. The starting point is that legal systems have coped relatively well so far with the use of computers by public authorities. The critical disruption of the Automated State predicted by Robert McBride in 1967 has not been materialised and, therefore, we have not been forced to substantively rethink the adequacy of how administrative law deals with machines. However, the incorporation of AI in automation may be that disruption. In this chapter, Bello y Villarino offers a counterpoint to those who believe that existing principles and rules can be easily adapted to address the use of AI in the public sector. He discusses the distinct elements of AI, through an exploration of the dual role of public authorities: a state that executes policy and a state that designs policy. The use of AI systems in both contexts are of a different regulatory order. Until now there has been an assumption that policy design should be allowed a broad margin of discretion, especially when compared to the state as an executor of policies and rules. Yet, the automation of policy design will require that public authorities make explicit decisions about objectives, boundary conditions, and preferences. Discretion for humans can remain, but AI systems analysing policy choices may suggest that certain options are superior to others. This could justify employing different legal lenses to approach the regulation of automated decision-making and decision-support systems used by the State. The reasoning, to some extent, could also be extrapolated to Automated Banks. Each perspective is analysed in reference to the activity of modern states. The main argument is that the AI-driven Automated State is not suited for the one-size-fits-all approach often claimed to apply to administrative law. The final part of the chapter explores some heuristics that could facilitate the regulatory transition.

Popular sovereignty requires a clearly defined and demarcated people. This chapter argues that the identity of the people in a liberal democracy is continually contested and renegotiated because any definition of the people in such a regime is endogenous to a specific political community which itself is ever-changing. As a result, liberal democracies renegotiate and redefine definitions of the people both formally, through laws governing citizenship, naturalization, and immigration, and informally, through redistributive policies and political rhetoric. This chapter illustrates this process of people-making by considering the claims for inclusion in “We the People” made by DREAMers and related efforts to remake definitions of “We the People” evidenced in the political rhetoric and policies of President Donald Trump.

This chapter analyses the policies of populist radical right party-led local governments in Austria, France, Italy and Switzerland. It assesses the extent to which their party ideology is evident. The analysis concerns three forms of policy: policy agendas, budgetary spending and policy designs. Each enables a different form of comparison to be made, through which the impact made by the parties and its cross-national variation is assessed. First, analysis of agendas reveals their policy priorities once elected into local government. These are compared with mainstream parties in similar contexts. Second, analysis of budgets shows the extent to which these priorities were realized in the form of spending. Comparison here is made with the preceding mainstream party-led local government in the same context. Third, analysis of their policies’ framing of target populations, policy tools and policy rationales demonstrates the varying extent to which they generate social constructions that align with party ideology. The leadership of local government by populist radical right parties in Western Europe is shown to lead to contrasting degrees and forms of policy impact.

Do our solutions to create credibility make a difference? Yes. This chapter and the rest of the book show how support for a clean energy transition increases when lawmakers make policies more credible and provide local economic benefits. We draw on various surveys and interviews to test our solutions for how credibility can be enhanced. For example, we demonstrate how laws rather than reversible promises can enhance credibility and garner more support. We also show how revealing the national consensus behind assistance to transitioning regions can reduce expectations of policy reversal. We also feature interviews with a range of energy firm executives and lobbyists, which complement our surveys of members of the public and local elected officials.

The sharing economy is transformative in that it decentralizes services by permitting direct transactions between individuals. A less recognized consequence is that it also decentralizes the geography of services, shifting their distribution away from major business districts and into residential communities. We present a three-part generalized theory for studying and developing policy responses to the arrival of these services in neighborhoods where they were not previously available. First, one must quantify the distribution of the new services across neighborhoods. Second, these geographic shifts in supply and demand can generate positive and negative externalities for communities, which might be hypothesized and tested for empirically. Third, policy responses can be developed based on the knowledge generated by components 1 and 2. We illustrate this proposed theory by examining the incursion of Airbnb short-term rentals into the neighborhoods of Boston, MA for 2010 to 2018. We demonstrate that Airbnb listings quickly grew into neighborhoods away from the downtown core where hotels are concentrated and hypothesize how this might increase investment in local buildings (measured through building permits), activity at local food establishments (measured through the number of new licenses), and crime (measured through 911 reports). We find initial evidence for increased investment through building permits and limited evidence for increased violent crime, but no evidence for increases in food establishments. This can then guide how cities regulate short-term rentals to maximize benefits and minimize negative impacts. We conclude by exploring how the theory might be applied to other forms of the sharing economy.

On-demand mobility services and Transportation Network Companies (TNC) are transforming urban mobility by providing more flexibility and improved level of service to users. However, they also raise concerns about their impact on congestion, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and competition with transit. Considering the popularity of TNC services, increasing ride-pooling is, potentially, an important means to address these concerns. While companies attempt to promote ride-pooling with pricing strategies, evidence suggests that shared trips are a small fraction of all trips. We review the literature on the impact of TNC on congestion and ridership of alternative sustainable modes and discuss opportunities to improve sharing performance. We examine two such opportunities: Alternative operating models that use advanced booking to improve shareability; and collaboration with traditional transit. In the first case, we use a large TNC data set to assess the benefits of advanced booking in terms of increasing shared trips and reducing VMT. The results suggest that even with short advanced request horizons, significant benefits can be realized, with little deterioration of the level of service that customers experience. In the second case, we review results from various partnerships between TNCs and transit agencies and highlight the main characteristics.

Improving urban mobility systems has been one of the main engineering challenges especially in large cities and metropolitan areas. Since their emergence, ridesharing services have had a promising outlook on disrupting the current urban transportation system and using technology to solve its problems. However, studies on their current and projected future accomplishments towards this goal are divided. Despite being supported by many well-designed studies, many recent studies point out the new problems caused by these services or the exacerbation of the old problems after their entry to the mobility services mix of a city. This chapter reviews the research from both sides and describes policy measures and research gaps that could help mitigate such potential negative impacts on traffic congestion and improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the urban mobility systems.

States confront grave credibility challenges when designing and delivering redress programmes. These programmes involve the state judging if, and how, it will redress its own offences. The resulting lack of independence makes it difficult for states to be credible providers. Reflecting on lessons drawn from practical experience, this chapter thematises survivor participation and choice as it explores how flexible and survivor-focussed strategies can address the emergent challenges.

Extreme weather events and catastrophic disasters have led to the widespread damage and destruction of homes and communities, and have produced large levels of involuntary displacement. Globally, the numbers of displaced persons are expected to grow due to the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, increased population exposure, and vulnerability to natural hazards. Several sociolegal complexities and dilemmas arise in addressing the needs of displaced populations and disaster survivors for which policy, governance, and legal solutions are not clearly defined. In this chapter, we draw on theories of social constructionism and contend that social constructions of displaced populations can affect the adoption, design, and implementation of laws and policies that apply to disaster survivors and displaced populations. Specifically, we examine how the perceptions, framing, and characterization of target groups of displaced populations such as school-aged children, homeless and highly mobile families, and long-time residents who have precarious forms of immigration status, can influence governance issues that may arise during post-disaster recovery both within affected and host communities. The findings suggest that despite formal expectations of equal legal treatment, positive and negative social constructions of target populations can lead to benefits and losses for those affected and displaced by disaster.