Why Are We Even Teaching ‘Legal Design Courses’? A Critique of the Pedagogical Simplification of Legal Design

Abstract

This article offers an insider’s critique of how legal design is taught in law schools. While stand-alone ‘Legal Design’ electives can open doors—introducing user research, prototyping, and clearer communication—the course-as-container contradicts design’s own logic and a competency-based vision of legal education. A single touchpoint, however inspiring, is a new form in an old process: it performs innovation without redesigning the learning journey. Drawing on experience, the paper reframes legal design not as a bounded topic but as a transversal competence that integrates knowledge, skills, and attitudes. It situates the field in a longer genealogy of efforts to make law intelligible and usable, and diagnoses the recent proliferation of packaged offerings as a marketable response that risks methodological dogmatism, peripheral placement, and weak constructive alignment.

In place of innovation theatre, the article proposes architectural moves that align means and ends: rewrite rubrics so readability, audience fit, accessibility, and iteration are assessed where they already should matter; scaffold non-expert colleagues through lightweight toolkits, micro-workshops, and student fellows; sequence learning from exposure to guided application to autonomy; create interdisciplinary spaces for co-making; and monitor curricula as designers would, with feedback loops and evidence of transfer. The claim is aspirational but pragmatic (a dream with constraints), arguing that law schools should keep the door (the elective) but build the house (a curriculum that makes design-inflected performance visible and gradable across contexts). The prize is not another module, but graduates who can shape lawful solutions that are usable, equitable, and responsive to human needs.