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Game Explanation









You have just played a sorting game with no single right answer. That was intentional.

The cards you held represent concepts from a new edited volume on legal design — a field that promises to make law more accessible, more usable, more human. The scenarios you read are based on real cases from legal design practice. The game asked you to place the concept cards where you thought they belonged.

Here is what the editors and contributors of the book would say.


Scenario 01 — The Online Tribunal


An online dispute-resolution tribunal for civil claims was built with a UX team and a consultancy company. It was tested with migrants, people with disabilities, and low-income users. 85% of cases settle before a decision is issued. 45% of users access it outside of court hours.

Cards that fit:
  • user — People in this system are not citizens deliberating about justice. They are users navigating a form. The system was designed around their needs as defined by its builders — not by the people themselves.
  • human-centered — The tribunal was built following the principles of human-centred design: research, testing, iteration, accessibility. By the standards of the field, it is a success.
  • law in action — The tribunal genuinely closes the gap between what the law promises and what people can actually access. It brings the law into daily life.
  • trojan horse — And yet. Nobody was asked whether this form of justice should exist. The right to a lawyer was removed by design. Convenience replaced representation. Market logic — efficiency, satisfaction, settlement rates — entered justice through the language of care.





    Scenario 02 — The Prioritization Algorithm


    A case management interface for judges, optimised for "time to resolution" and "satisfaction ratings." A year later: domestic violence cases deprioritised, debt cases rising to the top of the queue.

    Cards that fit:
    • trojan horse — This is the clearest example in the game. The interface was built with good intentions and sound UX principles. The result was a system that quietly redistributed access to justice — away from those who needed it most, toward cases that were easy to close. Market logic dressed as care.
    • user — Judges became users of a dashboard. Cases became tickets. The language of UX replaced the language of rights.
    • human-centred — The system was designed for its users — the judges. It worked. The problem was that "the user" was not the citizen.

    The hardest card:
    • law in books — The algorithm created a gap between what the law says (equal access, due process) and what the system actually delivered. You could argue this belongs here, or that it belongs nowhere — because the gap was invisible until civil society lawyers found it.





    Scenario 03 — The Walknography

    A researcher walked through a city alongside undocumented migrants for three days. No forms, no questionnaires. She mapped which spaces felt safe and which felt hostile. She brought her observations to a community meeting where the migrants themselves decided what to change first.

    Cards that fit:
    • citizen — The migrants were not users of a service. They were the ones deciding. The researcher offered material; the community held the authority.
    • & more — The method attended to space, not just people. Courts, streets, and buildings carried legal meaning. The inquiry extended beyond the individual human to the environment they moved through.
    • law in action — This is the most direct mapping of law as it is lived — in the body and in space: fear, avoidance, the choice to walk a longer route to stay away from a police station.

    Cards that deliberately do not fit:
    • human-centred — The method was presented at the Oñati workshop precisely as an expanded practice of inquiry — a deliberate departure from the logic of human-centred design, which would have begun with interviews, questionnaires, and a defined user group.
    • user — The researcher refused to turn the migrants into data sources. That refusal is the point.




      What the game was really about


      The concept cards you held represent a spectrum — from the language of citizenship (rights, participation, dignity, voice) to the language of the market (satisfaction, retention, churn, the client journey).

      Legal design sits somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. It borrows from human-centred design — a tradition built in industry, for commercial products, around the figure of the satisfied user. When that logic enters courts, public services, and democratic institutions, something shifts. Not always for the worse. But always worth asking: who is being centred, and at whose expense?

      The trojan horse card has no natural home in any single scenario. That is also intentional. The editors of this book argue that the trojan horse is not a bug in legal design — it is a structural tendency. Every time a designer makes a choice about whose needs to optimise for, a political decision is made. Usually quietly. Usually in the name of convenience.






      The concept cards, briefly


      citizen

       — A person with rights that do not depend on their behaviour or satisfaction. A political subject, not a customer.

      user

      — A person whose relationship to a system is defined by their experience of using it. Measurable. Optimisable. Retainable.

      human-centered

      — A design methodology that places the needs of the individual user at the centre of every decision. Developed in industry. Widely adopted in the public sector.

      & more-than-human

      — An expanding circle of concern: future generations, ecosystems, non-human entities. Legal design that asks not only for whom but for what.

      law in books

      — The law as written. Statutes, codes, precedents. The formal promise of justice.

      law in action

      — The law as lived. Who actually reaches the court. What it costs. What it feels like. The gap between the promise and the reality.

      trojan horse

      — The concept at the heart of this book. Market values — efficiency, satisfaction, scalability — entering the language of justice through the vocabulary of design.






      The Socio-Politics of Legal Design and its Epistemic Consequences Edited by Siddharth Peter de Souza and Joaquín Santuber Oñati International Series in Law and Society — Hart Publishing