The Relationship between Legal and Design Cultures: Tension and Resolution

Abstract

The central thesis of legal design is that service design principles and methods can be usefully applied to legal processes. This necessarily involves lawyers commissioning, participating in, and implementing design projects. This chapter examines anthropological and sociological accounts of professional practice and posits that there are some cultural hurdles to developing this law/design relationship.

There are identifiable lawyerly attributes and mindsets derived from legal culture. This culture is not homogeneous but at its heart are themes of precedent, formality, and textual/verbal articulacy. Design has its own cultural tropes including flexibility, experimentation, and visual literacy. The cultural centres of law and design are some distance apart and this tension may be problematic for those seeking design interventions into law.

These cultural constructs have significant power, but they also exhibit plasticity. The chapter concludes by examining the potential of both cultural change and exchange to ease the process of introducing human-centred design characteristics into legal practices.

Keywords: anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, design culture, legal culture