Once, lawyers worked in small towns and rural communities across America. Abraham Lincoln, America’s most famous rural lawyer, even rose to the presidency. But today, rural areas have insufficient numbers, and as existing rural lawyers age the shortage gets worse. These legal deserts leave rural clients without lawyers and rural communities without law-educated individuals to serve as elected officials, volunteers, and community leaders.

This chapter focuses on visualising the law, in the form of comics, as a specific way to understand the realm of legal design. Focusing on the case study of Lawtoons, we detail the existing definitional inconsistencies of legal design and advocate for clarity in appreciating the purview of this emerging discipline. The legal design community must have, at its very core, the ability to visualise law to make law available at scale. We also briefly lay the conceptual foundations of visualisation in law and argue that graphics and storytelling are an important way to promote dignity in legal awareness and education.

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 offers insights, stories, reflections, and practical examples of hope amid turbulent times. Given the constant need to reimagine our social-legal systems and teach new legal education strategies, we must codesign solutions with movement leaders and other advocates working to shift narratives and power structures in the legal system. As we seek to reimagine our world within the framework of health, equity, healing, human rights, and transformative justice, we must find new methods to develop students’ imaginations and build strategies to reimagine our social-legal systems in educational institutions. By codesigning solutions with movement leaders and other advocates, we can work to shift narratives and power structures in the legal system and beyond.

As the practice of law increasingly deploys digital technology to deliver services and information, more law schools are including instruction in technical skills. The prospect of more lawyers with digital expertise renders salient a potentially overlooked imperative: that instruction in technical skills must be paired with the development of a critical orientation toward those skills that interrogates how the techno-solutionist values exist in tension with legal values of human agency and dignity. This chapter examines the cautions of skills-forward approaches to incorporating technology into law pedagogy and practice, arguing that developing a sensitivity toward the social, economic, and political contexts in which technology is produced is essential to ensuring such expertise is applied in ways that continuously improve the quality of encounters with the law, rather than simply reproduce them in digital terms. Coupling technical instruction with critical approaches to technology can prepare professionals not only to design novel digital solutions in law practice but also to fundamentally improve legal institutions and programs through the design of technology.

By looking to the role of legal education as a site of socialization, this chapter joins fellow critical scholarships in analyzing law schools as both remnants and conduits of harmful design methodologies. Dignity, as a principle of community sovereignty and self-determination, has been antithetical to the legal profession’s practices of gatekeeping and remains systematically absent from the infrastructure of legal education. Legal design provides a promising point of intervention for disrupting these violent methodologies – if law schools will allow it. In acknowledging the position of law students as inheritors to legacies of legal harm, this chapter makes an urgent call for centralizing law students in the legal profession’s reimagining of service design models. Through practices of resistance, repair, and responsiveness, law student engagement with the broader critical design movement is necessary for realizing a human-centered legal profession and a future predicated on the intrinsic dignity of all.

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.

This chapter considers trends and developments in legal education in Asia through the lens of some representative polities, namely China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore. The experience of these polities indicates that understanding of legal education in Asia cannot be divorced from colonisation and the imposition (or reception) of Western law. It has also been influenced more recently by globalisation as seen from increased cross-border flows of faculty and students, the teaching of transnational law subjects, the development of particular forms of teaching practice such as legal clinics and programmes equivalent to the Juris Doctor, explicit focus on transnational rankings, and transnational scholarly communities engaged in teaching and research collaboration.

Examining the history and institutions of the legal systems in Afghanistan, we contend that there is an under-examined set of plural legal systems – those where different legal traditions remain in continual contention. Unlike mixed legal systems, these plural legal systems are not composed of mixed, blended, or accommodated models, but of conflicting legal influences that fail to create a well-functioning legal order, contributing to social and political conflicts. In this chapter, we first discuss the different characteristics of divided legal systems. Next, we explain why Afghanistan has failed to overcome the problem of a divided legal system.

This chapter, stimulated by Professor Bell’s contribution to legal education (as well as to comparative law and legal reasoning), tackles the question of whether traditional doctrinal law has anything to offer, intellectually, to disciplines outside law. That is to say, does law export knowledge to other disciplines or does it just import knowledge? Despite John Bell’s positive agenda asserted some eighteen or so years ago, this examination presents a gloomy picture. This is not to argue that law faculties are making no contributions to the Academy in general – indeed, the opposite is true. But such contributions are largely founded on knowledge imported into law faculties. Comparative lawyers, or some of them such as Professor Bell, offer some hope.

This chapter explores the influence of the rhetorical tradition on the early modern common law of interpretation. It focuses on William Fulbecke’s A Direction or Preparative to the Study of the Lawe (1600), a guidebook that instructed law students on principles of legal interpretation. Fulbecke was writing at a time when interest in interpretation was particularly intense, but his discussion is striking for its unusual sophistication. The chapter argues that Fulbecke’s account was strongly influenced by works on rhetoric, the art of speech and persuasion. Fulbecke was a pioneering comparative lawyer, and would have known that rhetoric was often used to aid interpretation by lawyers of the ius commune. The chapter demonstrates that rhetorical ideas also pervaded the English law of interpretation. Their influence is clear in Fulbecke’s work: Fulbecke aimed to set out a clear method of legal interpretation for beginners, based on the rhetorical works that students encountered at school and university. This chapter broadens our understanding of the relationship between the common law and the rhetorical tradition, demonstrating the importance of understanding the history of English law in its wider intellectual context.

‘ The inns of court man that never was studient’ argues that the contemporary stereotype of the idle and dissolute young inns of court gallant with more interest in playgoing than reading law reports, while doubtless exaggerated for moral and satirical effect, is corroborated by an abundance of biographical evidence.It also reflects two prime causes of student delinquency and disinclination for legal studies: lack of supervision and the intractability of the common law as a subject of study. ‘Guides to Method’ surveys the legal literature available to students, concluding that it offered little assistance to those attempting to navigate the law’s complexities. ‘Lay and Professional Legal Knowledge’ emphasises the gulf between the practising barrister’s expertise and the kinds of legal knowledge which most laymen were likely to need or possess.

Yet members acquired and exercised a remarkably wide range of non-legal accomplishments and skills. ‘Accomplishments and the Decline of Creativity’ argues that the inns did little to encourage such activities, especially after c.1615. ‘Varieties of Learning’ surveys the remarkably diverse intellectual life of the early modern inns, while the closing section ‘Achievements, Failures, Prescriptions’ evaluates their diverse roles as educational institutions, and the few contemporary proposals for their reform.

After an introductory excursus on the concept of the inns as early modern England’s third university, this chapter outlines the form of legal instruction which they provided by means of oral ‘learning exercises’, notably case-putting in moots and other exercises involving the argument of hypothetical cases in law,and ‘readings’ or lectures at both the inns of court and chancery.

The second section (‘The State of the Learning Exercises to 1640’) considers the supposed decline in the performance of exercises. It argues that even though they may have been rendered largely obsolete by the advent of the printed law-book, there is little to suggest that they were not generally performed in a conscientious and regular fashion before the outbreak of the civil war. But it was one thing to preserve the system as a going concern, quite another to revive it after the disruptions of the 1640s and ‘50s.