Liberty of thought is the first liberty that the Preamble to the Constitution of India aims to secure. Yet, one finds no mention of ‘thought’ as one of the protected freedoms under Part III of the Constitution, which safeguards fundamental rights. This chapter takes the first steps to address this riddle and locating the normative foundations for the right. It argues that while the Preambular ideal itself is insufficient to confer a substantive right, its role in judicial interpretation, along with the interrelationship between fundamental rights, provides a robust normative foundation for the right to freedom of thought in India. Specifically, the chapter discusses the development of the right to mental privacy in the context of brain-reading in Selvi, and later in Puttaswamy. The right to (mental) privacy read into dignity by the Supreme Court of India already takes steps towards constructing a forum internum, and on the other hand, the challenge of the vulnerability of the legal subject becomes evident in the context of the right to freedom of conscience. Regarding the absolute nature of the right, this chapter argues that only as a Preambular ideal is the liberty of thought absolute within the Indian legal framework.

This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.

This is the first of three chapters which present ‘mini-studies’ of dignity. If, as the book argues, abstract discussion of dignity elides much of what we need to know about the concept, these mini-studies are designed to illustrate how a more contextualised treatment can take us further. Each of the mini-studies is concerned with dignity at a particular time, in a particular place, and with reference to a particular object. In the case of this chapter, the object is a series of photographs taken of Trucanini, a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman once (erroneously) said to be the ‘last of her race’. The chapter explores dignity at the intersection of colonial photography and Victorian race science.

In this chapter, the second of the book’s mini-studies of dignity, we turn to early twentieth-century India. Here the object is cloth, and the focus is on Gandhi’s campaign for the manufacture and use of homespun cloth (khadi). The language of dignity was a striking feature of that campaign; Gandhi appealed to Indians to ‘realise their dignity’ by discarding their foreign cloth and renewing their home textile industry. Yet while he made that appeal, the great Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar insisted that dignity could not be achieved for all Indians without social transformation, including the dismantling of the Hindu system of caste.

This is the third and final of the book’s mini-studies of dignity. Jumping forward in time again to twenty-first-century South Africa, this chapter revolves around an object that bears on an important aspect of what many people today understand by dignity: the toilet. As one campaigning slogan has it, ‘sanitation is dignity’. South Africa is a country in which there exist large disparities in the distribution of sanitation services, with black South Africans considerably less well served than white South Africans. The chapter follows the efforts of poor black communities to secure or defend sanitary dignity through litigation and public protest.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book’s subject matter and an initial sense of its ‘worldly’ orientation and themes. Some common spheres in which dignity is important are surveyed (end-of-life arrangements and funerals, access to sanitation and hygiene products, practices of health and social care, relations in the workplace, etc.), leading to the postulation of three general points: dignity is performative, embodied and ineliminably relational; dignity is emergent – a process, and not simply a quality, attribute or state of being; dignity is political, in that it is enmeshed with the wider conditions affecting economy, society and culture.

This chapter presents the book’s conclusions. Drawing together the threads of the three mini-studies, the chapter puts forward an account of human dignity that calls into question the conventional distinction between ‘status dignity’ and ‘intrinsic dignity’, and highlights the status-based character of dignity, viewed from the standpoint of less privileged people. Regarding the book’s title, it is recalled that this is a reference to the stare often commented upon by viewers of one of the photographs discussed in Chapter 3. Trucanini’s stare may be taken to suggest both the enigma of dignity and the dignity that stems from the ultimate inaccessibility to others of private experience and thoughts.

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.