Community-Led System Design

This class engages students in participatory/collaborative approaches to redesign complex systems. They will answer the question: how do we make our social legal systems better for people -- and how do we put people at the center of this redesign? The seminar has two parallel components: (1) Learn from a series of experts who have been taking a community-led approach to remaking a legal system (or analogous ones). Guest experts will present their current case studies to illustrate strategy and process design. (2) Select one of two system redesign challenges (see below) and develop their own prototype launching workshop. [For those students interested in continuing with the project, there will be a companion policy lab in the Spring Quarter 2018. This seminar is a prerequesite for the policy lab.] The two prospective system-leader partners are on the verge of major new overhauls of their current systems: (a) California Self-Help Services' guardianship/kid's custody redesign, with Bonnie Hough and the California Judicial Council as a partner, as they try to figure out how to remake the legal system for parents and family members (without lawyers) trying to get custody worked out for kids. (b) New York Chief Justice Task Force housing court/eviction redesign, with the Chief Judge Janet DiFiore's task force as the partner, as they try to figure out how to make the eviction system work better for users. Students will develop their own preliminary plan and prototype for a user-centered process for their partner. Students will learn about new approaches to policy-change, as well as the fundamentals of participatory design and community lawyering. They will operationalize these different approaches, to make them relevant and actionable in an actual legal system. They must synthesize a recommendation to their partner-leader about how they might create a better process to redesign a given court process/system. And they must create a prototype of a launching workshop, that can demonstrate how a wider process would work, while also testing their plan. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Class Participation, Written Assignments, Final Paper.