A new attitude to laws empire: the potentialities of legal design

Legal Design is a movement to make the law work better for people. This chapter makes the case that Legal Design constitutes a new attitude to law that reveals potential benefits in making law more participatory and human-centered. Despite its often radical departure from culturally inherited perceptions of what legal services look like and involve, Legal Design involves a turning towards law's virtues of certainty, direction, order and justice. The diverse applications of Legal Design in this collection show that it brings new opportunities to, in Dworkin's phrase, cast law in its best light. These contributions range across prototyping policy, proactive lawyering and effective contracting, the law/design cultural relationship, intellectual property, consumer and tenant protections, dispute resolution and legal education. The collection comes at a time when Legal Design is still in its emergent phase as a cognate field of activity, a new sub-discipline, and it contributes to the ongoing dialogue on the methods, mindsets and goals of Legal Design.