Kohti ihmislähtöisempää oikeutta muotoilun avulla
Keywords:
oikeus- ja yhteiskuntatieteellinen tutkimus, ennakoiva oikeus, oikeuksiin pääsy, oikeusmuotoilu, ihmislähtöisyysAbstract
Towards a more human-centered law by design
Legal design is an emerging interdisciplinary approach to solving and preventing legal problems and enabling desirable outcomes using human-centric design. Although legal design has gained increasing interest amongst international legal scholars during the past decade, it has not received much attention as a research topic in Finland. This article introduces legal design by focusing on two perspectives: the theoretical and the applicational. First, the authors describe how legal design gets theoretical support from established socio-legal research traditions, particularly from the Luhmannian systems view of society, as well as from the proactive law approach and the Access to Justice theory. Legal design shares many of their paradigms, but especially their empirical, complexity-aware and impact-oriented approaches to law. However, legal design develops their instrumental understanding of law further by converting legal abstractions into something visual and tangible, which can be developed by human-centric design. Legal design thus provides a new viewpoint and new empirical methods to modern legal studies to research and develop the impact of law. As a potential emerging discipline that combines both research and development activities, legal design resembles other design sciences that seek to answer the question of how something is improved or created. The authors also describe the design process framework and how it can be used as a method for empirical and interdisciplinary legal research.
