Abstract:

The aim of this paper is to tell about the possibilities of storytelling, fairy tales and poems in Legal Design and in teaching of law.

Justice is difficult to access on many levels. There are geographical, economic, cultural and linguistic barriers on the way. The law speaks in its own language to its own actors. In addition, the complexity of the modern world is creating increasingly complex law, often requiring special expertise in a particular legal field.

The legal system decides what is legal and what is illegal. Its function is to provide sufficient assurance of the legal consequences of one’s deeds. In a way, it prepares us to face the inevitable disappointments. However, justice cannot effectively fulfill this important role in society if one cannot access the law.

Laurea University of Applied Sciences has a Master’s Degree Program on Legal Design and Legal Expertise, which started at the beginning of 2019. We study above all the methods of Service Design in making legal services and texts more accessible and understandable. It is essential to acquire user understanding and develop legal services with users. The means are the design of user paths, different visual solutions as well as the disassembly of the legalese into understandable, clear text.

Some practices are not immediately recognized as methods of Legal Design: storytelling and poetry. Few of us have read the statute book or familiarized themselves with existing laws in an official online database. In fact, we have learned much of the content of justice through stories.
The first, and in many respects, essential stories are the stories heard and read in our childhood: the fairy tales. Storybooks impressively combine the touching magic of fairy tales, the universal legal and moral principles, and the visual expression supporting them. However, we do not leave the stories behind when we grow up. We hear and read stories constantly.

One of the student teams decided to redesign the municipal debt counseling services. One of the results was a story titled “This could happen to you”. I will discuss the methods students used in their development process. There will also be a description of the story itself.
At best, poems are as impressive as fairy tales and stories. They have also worked in many cultures as a means of memory and communication.

We wrote a series of poems based on Finnish legislation during the meetings. Poetry exercises help to understand the content of the legal text. At the same time, complex sentence structures are dismantled into simple, striking verses without any decrease of legally important information. As an example, I will discuss some of the results of such an exercise.

When I planned the program, I used systems theory as a theoretical basis, especially in the form developed by Niklas Luhmann. It identifies different functional systems in our modern society, which, in turn, manage their own specific functions. These systems include the economy, politics, justice, education, science and art. The systems cannot communicate directly with each other, but require structural and operational couplings. For example, the legal system can use the elements of art to carry out the function of law – as it may happen in the case of Legal Design. In our master’s program, there are dimensions that reach all these systems. Some explanatory viewpoints of this theoretical basis are presented in the article.

Keywords:

Storytelling, Poetry, Legal Design, Law, Systems Theory.