A Critical Assessment of the Notion of Legal Design through the Case of “Les Surligneurs”, a Legal-Checking Media Outlet
(2023) The Legal Design Roundtable — Location: Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles (17.February.2023)
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- Abstract
- Politics and the law have become more complex, due to the complexification of global issues (climate, refugees, economy, international security, etc.). This complexity threatens democratic processes, such as during public elections, because citizens struggle more in finding intelligible information and understanding the functioning of our democracies at all levels. The difficulty to find intelligible information is deepened by the polarization of the public debate and the massification of information sources. In this new informative market , law specialists such as legal scholars are scarcely heard in the public debate, whereas their expertise could be valuable in order to enlighten the public debate. This context makes it easier to disinformation and misinformation on legal matters to spread. In the wake of numerous fact-checking initiatives, the association "Les Surligneurs", founded in France in 2017 and disseminating in Europe (Belgium), aims to carry out legal-checking, i.e. to verify the conformity with the law of statements made by public figures, particularly in the media. Legal-checking also aims to shed light on the political debate through legal issues. These two objectives are achieved through "legal highlightings" (surlignages) or "legal clarifications" (éclairages) operations, in which law professors, or students, under the supervision of professors write short articles, easily accessible to the general public. The legal issues are then clearly apparent: legally false, problematic, to be qualified, incomplete, etc. statements are "highlighted," and politically debated subjects are "clarified" in law. These articles are then published online (https://lessurligneurs.eu/) and disseminated on social networks, all with a view to feeding the public debate. The project follows some clear design patterns (yellow color, recognisable logo, structure of the short articles to be more readable, etc.) and could therefore be seen as part of the legal design movement. Legal design was notably conceptualised in 2013 by Margaret Hagan (Stanford University, USA) and works towards a better understanding, visibility and accessibility of the law from the point of view of its users, following a user-centred approach. However, the project “Les Surligneurs” was created without knowing about the legal design movement. This movement only started to gain interest in France in 2018-2019. In fact, the project was born from the meeting between two flatmates around a radio station in the wake of the french elections, Vincent Couronne, a researcher in law and Joachim Savin, an industrial designer. Moreover, the project didn’t really follow the canonical approach (inherited from design thinking) of a legal design project: it was not the result of a user-research approach. Yet, Les Surligneurs can be related to a “meaning driven design” as it was framed by Le Gall and Saint-Auguste, 2020. This case study along with other pre-legal-design projects and the fact that legal design itself is the application of design thinking (an innovation method theorized in the 80’s at Stanford University, where Margaret Hagan did her PhD) to the legal field, raises the following questions: to which academic field does design thinking belong? Which frame should we use to look at projects at the intersection of Design and the Law? These issues will be critically assessed in the paper, paying attention to the rise of the legal design movement and the real improvement of user’s needs.
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Citations
de Clippele, M.-S., & et al. (2023). A Critical Assessment of the Notion of Legal Design through the Case of “Les Surligneurs”, a Legal-Checking Media Outlet. The Legal Design Roundtable, Université Saint-Louis - Bruxelles. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/165477