Socio-Politics of Legal Design and its Epistemic Consequences

This book brings together diverse perspectives from researchers working in the fields of law, justice, and design to interrogate the emergence of vocabularies and methods of legal design and unpack their epistemic consequences.

Legal design has emerged in the last decade as an interdisciplinary practice, at the intersection of law and justice, and initially human-centred design. Despite the short history of legal design as a discipline, its foundations in human-centred design have been questioned. Justifying all sorts of innovation for the universal needs of users is even more problematic for human-centred design due to its large adoption in industry and the public sector. Placing a market type of human-consumer at the centre of the legal design activity justifies the reproduction of capitalist and oppressive systems by placing the inspiration for new products and services on the human-user-consumer. The adoption of such practices in policy and legal design can be seen as a tool to impose the market values over democracy, justice, and equality.

This book offers a wide array of alternatives and reference points for making sense of legal design. It critically addresses issues of epistemic injustice in the designing of legal services and systems, bringing together the tradition of socio-legal studies in dialogue with new concepts and frameworks from critical design approaches.