What is Legal Design?

Legal Design is an innovative approach to law grounded in user-centered design principles. It views the users of law as individuals with diverse needs, abilities, and backgrounds, aiming to make legal norms and processes clearer, more accessible, and more useful. This is a relatively new discipline: fifteen years ago it was almost unknown, but today it is increasingly present in both academic research and professional practice.
One of its core principles is its empirical nature, which involves observing how people interact with law to design more effective solutions.

It combines experimental methodology with design creativity to improve legal communication, document design, and overall user experience. In this perspective, Legal Design is not merely a question of aesthetics or layout, but a way of rethinking law as a people-centered service that responds to real human needs and fosters a more inclusive, comprehensible legal culture.

The animated video

Building on the project’s findings, the team decided to produce an animated video that would apply the principles emerging from the study to make the rule of law more accessible. The research had shown that non-experts, unlike experts, perceive terms related to the rule of law as vague and difficult to contextualize.

An animated video was chosen because it naturally forces abstract ideas to be expressed through concrete, relatable imagery. While images can convey complex meanings, they always depict something tangible, helping shift the discussion from theory to everyday experience. Video is also one of the most consumed formats online, familiar to a wide range of audiences.

The next step was identifying the target audience through human-centered design and legal design principles. After several discussions, middle and high-school students were selected as the primary audience, placing the story in a school environment. This led to the idea of setting the narrative in a classroom, using situations such as tests, grades, and punishments—contexts that most people can recognise from personal experience.

This direction was welcomed enthusiastically, though with awareness of the risk of sounding overly educational or paternalistic. To avoid this, the team chose a more engaging approach: using hooks that speak directly to students (“Do you know how to defend yourself from an unfair grade?” instead of “Do you know what the rule of law is?”), adding irony, and creating characters with a light and relatable tone.

The video also acknowledges the diversity of the audience. Some students may be uninterested, others well-informed, but there is a significant group in between that may never have considered the practical implications of the rule of law. The goal is to offer this group a concrete, experience-based way of understanding principles that are often treated as purely abstract.