Call for Papers: Workshop on “Legal Design as Academic Discipline: Foundations, Methodology, Applications”

The workshop “Legal Design as Academic Discipline: Foundations, Methodology, Applications” will take place on December 12, 2018 in Groningen (Netherlands) during JURIX, the 31st international conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

Please note that you must register and participate in the workshop, if your paper is accepted.

Call for papers

Legal Design is an interdisciplinary approach to apply human-centered design to prevent or solve legal problems. It can help to create functional, inclusive and transparent legal documents, services, and systems. Whereas Legal Design is enjoying notable success in the business world, it has not yet been established as an academic discipline.

This workshop welcomes theoretical contributions, for instance on:

• What is Legal Design? What is it not?

• Which methodologies can be applied and for which purposes?

• From which neighbouring research fields can Legal Design benefit?

• What is the added value of Legal Design to the academic field?

• How can Legal Design help to develop and validate new legal theories?

It also welcomes the description of practical applications (projects, practices and examples, better if grounded in legal informatics):

• access, usability, communication and visualisation of legal documents, data and information

• improving access to justice and remedies for different stakeholders

• design of interfaces for artificial intelligence in the legal domain

• design and evaluation of legal digital services (platforms, apps, etc.)

• usable applications for natural language processing  of legal texts

• design of technologies (e.g. blockchain, algorithms, artificial intelligence, platforms, etc.) in compliance  with the applicable laws

• implementation and enforcement of legal principles through IT, design and behavioural economics (choice architectures, patterns, etc.)

• interpretation of legal visualizations

• transparency of legal information and documentation

• usability in privacy, data protection, and security

• Legal Design in & for education

Workshop format: we propose a mixed format for a half-day workshop, with a focus on active interaction among participants.

Part I:  this part of the workshop will be dedicated to short paper presentations. An interactive activity will follow, where the elements that act as lowest common denominator among all applications are identified and discussed in small groups.

Part II: this part of the workshop will be dedicated to a panel discussion where the elements emerged in part I will be summed up and critically discussed within the framework of the Legal Design Manifesto. Special attention will be devoted to critical points and potential issues represented by Legal Design methods.

Audience: academics from various disciplines (i.e. law, design, computer science, Human-Computer Interaction, behavioural sciences, communication, etc.) and representatives of public bodies.

Template for paper

Ideally, your paper should include:

1. The research scenario

2. The research questions and motivation

3. Methodology

4. Analysis and results

5. Limitations

6. Future work

7. Conclusions

You can download an example of template to guide the drafting of your paper.

Deadlines:

• 14 November 2018: Submission of draft paper (min. 2000 words)