This book is an introduction to the new field of legal design and a primer on both the application and theory of legal design that has developed so far in a decade of exploration and experimentation. We have assembled case studies of pioneering efforts from around the world, collected examples of methods and perspectives just now coming into focus, and offer a handful of proscriptions for the future. Bookending those three subject areas are both individual and collective articulations of these editors’ frames of reference and influence in our work together—dignity, law, and radical imagination. Our collective frame for this volume is relentlessly optimistic. We believe that the new field of legal design provides a promising intervention for challenging the harmful systems, structures, methodologies and outcomes that currently define legal systems, and designing systems that actually embody and effectuate the full promise of the rule of law – a just, peaceful, and equitable world for everyone.

In this chapter, we introduce the NuLawLab’s pedagogical activities and how dignity has played out in the classroom and experiential learning as a method, core value, and outcome. This chapter details the role of the laboratory model in making the connection between real-world problems and legal education, and the NuLawLab’s application of that concept, which focuses on actively and explicitly making connections among scholarship, community projects, and classrooms. To further our work in teaching legal design, we strive to keep our teaching strategies straightforward and accessible, making legal design available to a broader range of students. We’re determined to explore every avenue to expand legal design’s reach and integration into legal education. We aim to collaborate across institutions to elevate the entire field and establish a more innovative legal design community. These goals align with our commitment to fostering a more inclusive, diverse, and inventive legal design community that empowers students to address the intricate challenges of the legal system.

This chapter advocates for dignity to be the purpose, the lodestar, of contracting. By considering contracts through the lens of dignity, lawyers and designers can help prevent injustice and the indignity of people’s encounters with contracts that are not designed to be understood. Designing contracts for dignity is about enhancing the capacity and capability of the weaker, subordinate, or vulnerable party to autonomously understand their rights and obligations. Autonomy is an essential element common to both contracts and dignity. By enhancing the autonomy of vulnerable parties, the dignity of those vulnerable people is better served, and the assumptions that underpin the law of contracting are validated.

In this chapter, I introduce philosophical conceptions of dignity and how the framework can serve as the foundation for the interdisciplinary collaboration between design and law as a way to promote human and social values. I further highlight the significance of dignity by providing problematic examples in the intersection of design and law. I propose that there is a need to investigate the moral principles underlying human-centered design in collaboration with law. Together, design and law will contribute to the development of service systems that can improve dignity in citizens’ everyday lives and create positive and real changes in the world.

This chapter examines the emerging field of legal design through a critical reflection on the literature on academic disciplines and disciplinarity and argues that legal design does meet the criteria for recognition as an emerging academic subdiscipline. Its central contention is that legal design academics (together with their collaborative partners) have a timely opportunity to intentionally design the modalities of their nascent discipline. Academic disciplines can be understood in various ways. Whether this is, for example, from a sociological or an anthropological perspective, legal design has the chance to examine the human experience of disciplinarity and to consciously build an academic discipline that promotes dignity and value for its users, be they academic practitioners, students, or wider professional communities.

Using Northeastern University School of Law’s Domestic Violence Institute’s (DVI) virtual clinic as a case study, this chapter contends that service design methods can address systemic and pernicious access to justice issues that have a chilling effect on survivors seeking legal services. It details foundational information about domestic violence survivors and the work of the clinic pre-COVID-19, before detailing the danger, disruption, and delays that the public health measures and Court closures had on survivors’ lives. It then details the process and outcomes of a rapid-response service design intervention that quickly overhauled DVI’s operations and created a survivor-centered framework that remains in place today, tackling systemic and pernicious access to justice issues while simultaneously amplifying the voices, experiences, and needs of survivors.

This chapter details the tenacious efforts to bring dignity and justice to domestic workers in Massachusetts, culminating in the passage of the Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights of 2014. Natalicia R. Tracy, who led the Brazilian Workers’ Center’s efforts to pass the law, provides us with a front-line view of this particular national workers’ rights movement, how it manifested in Massachusetts, and how her organization partnered with artists and designers to place workers’ dignity at the center of the successful organizing strategy.

Design is integral to every part of our justice system: from the built spaces like courtrooms and the clerk’s office counter, to the paper and digital forms litigants submit, to the rules of procedure themselves. This chapter argues that good architectural design can make our justice system more just by enhancing participants’ sense of fairness and dignity, and more efficient by contributing to mindsets from which it is easier for parties to resolve conflict. We begin by discussing historical inspirations and manifestations of courtroom and courthouse design. We then look at some of the key stakeholders who make design decisions before highlighting a few modern efforts to use design to bring dignity to patrons of courthouses. We illustrate our position by referencing a 2018 collaboration among a graduate architecture studio course at Wentworth Institute of Technology, Northeastern University School of Law’s NuLawLab, and Massachusetts Housing Court in which architecture and law students and faculty tackled spatial interventions in Boston Housing Court.

Balancing individual autonomy and collective action is crucial in promoting dignity in participatory policy processes, particularly within urban policymaking. This chapter presents a case study of Lancaster City Council’s efforts to redesign the deteriorating “Mainway” housing estate, home to approximately 500 diverse inhabitants, within a dignified, inclusive framework. The project required devising a participatory process that effectively solicited input from all community members, including both regular meeting attendees and those sceptical of authority or unable to leave their flats due to health concerns. Amidst these complexities and COVID-19 restrictions, the My Mainway initiative was born. This ongoing initiative aims to transform the challenged estate through a £35 million urban regeneration project. Using a dignity-focused legal design framework, we examine how such an intricate process can facilitate dignified participation, ensuring a fair, respectful platform and offering advocacy for the seldom heard in community decisions.

This chapter offers a description of the complex interaction between power and poverty in light of the portrayal of Jesus in the canonical gospels. His message of salvation, example of solidarity with the poor, and presence in the life of the church offer a direct challenge to impersonal systems of societal arrangement that promote injustice. The Gospels provide a striking testimony for and guide to the essential work of solidarity with the poor.

This chapter analyzes a number of municipal decrees and honorary inscriptions from Campania which can be dated to the second century CE. In these texts freed persons receive honors and privileges as a reward for their benefactions towards the community. The phenomenon itself is not surprising, but most acts of generosity by freed persons were done in their capacity as Augustales. In all cases discussed in this chapter the benefactions were done on a voluntary basis after negotiations with representatives of the city’s main political bodies. The most striking aspect of these texts is the language in which the benefactors are praised. They are heralded as role models whose behavior should be imitated by their fellow-citizens and their acts of generosity are praised as contributions to the political landscape. The benefactors provide a service to the community which corresponds to the standing of the city. While these texts may not prove that freed persons at the municipal level were consistently viewed in a positive light, a case can be made that at least some of them were regarded as valued members of the community. This evidence can then be used to broaden our perspective on the integration of freed persons in Roman society.

Numerous reports addressing the care of older people have highlighted deficiencies in th provision of nutrition, hydration, and personal hygiene. Healthcare organisations may inadvertently compromise dignity by prioritising measurable targets and not placing due emphasis on the core work of looking after frail older people who are at risk of having their dignity violated.

The concept of dignity draws on ideas of dignity of merit, moral stature, and Menschenwürde (human dignity) – the dignity that each individual has as an essential component of being a human being. It is argued here that older people, as a group, are particularly worthy of the dignity of merit of wisdom, by virtue of their experience and associated understanding.

A suitable environment is important to promoting dignity; the emphasis is not only on basics like nutrition, hydration, and hygiene but on the delivery of person-centred care that encourages understanding of an older person’s life story.

Dying will come to us all (with even greater certainty than old age), and all older people have a right to respect and dignity when dying. Understanding how someone lived their life, and what was important to that person allows us to co-write the final chapter with preservation of autonomy and maintenance of dignity of personal identity.

The idea that every society ought to ensure each of its citizens an adequate standard of living is widely accepted. Martha Nussbaum has argued that such a standard should be understood as a set of capabilities adequate for a life of human dignity, an ample minimum that can be ascertained through public reasoning in each society.In this chapter the author shows why public reasoning about capabilities can be expected to support a higher standard that is optimal rather than minimal: the highest capability levels that could be sustained for everyone by the productive capacity of their society. The argument rests on a conception of equal dignity among human beings striving to live well, each in his or her own way. The first and most urgent step towards reaching this social optimum consists, at a lower level, in overcoming hardships.

A minority of countries or parts of countries have thus far accepted the legal practice of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) (euthanasia and assisted suicide), but legalising MAiD is expanding worldwide. More countries are debating legalisation of euthanasia or assisted suicide, but the nature of laws and legal practices vary greatly and both ethical and empirical assessments of current practices are the subject of much controversy. We examine the premises and evidence in the rhetoric of assisted suicide and euthanasia. We illustrate the trend with the rationale and political concerns that led to the legalisation of euthanasia in Quebec as “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD), and its subsequent expansion in Canada to include persons who do not suffer from a terminal illness, including persons who suffer only from a mental illness. The values of autonomy, “dying with dignity“ and their ethical and legal bases for justifying MAiD are critically analysed. The implications of practicing euthanasia, as opposed to assisted suicide are discussed, as well as proposals for a duty to die in some circumstances. We conclude by proposing that besides debating the legal, moral and practical concerns with MAiD, we should also focus on the psychological roots of our fears and ways to reduce those fears in individuals and societies.