5 Hacking the Law Social Justice Education through Lawtech

The Setting

The Law Division at London South Bank University is a community law school with a strong mission to widen participation. It serves a highly diverse student body in Inner London. Non-traditional students2 in British universities face many different barriers, and we have to work hard to ensure that our students will succeed and find worthwhile employment after graduation. The ethos of the Law Division is social justice. This permeates our teaching, with an emphasis on human rights throughout or courses. We see our role as that of preparing and empowering our students to enter the legal sector as well as other types of graduate employment. However, we also hope that our graduates will serve their communities and recognize the real issues of social justice locally, nationally, and internationally. To put human rights and social justice into practice, we aim to equip our students with an appreciation of the importance of ethics and the ability to think critically about difficult issues.

Our practice is underpinned by a strong belief in experiential learning, in learning by doing. Second-year law students are required to take an employability module to introduce them to the skills required for the legal sector, which includes a work placement in local law firms, advice settings, and local government.

Legal Advice Clinic

We also offer an extracurricular Legal Advice Clinic, which provides some of these work placements. The clinic uses an innovative drop-in model in which students provide initial social welfare law advice (including housing, family, employment, welfare rights, and consumer law) to clients under the supervision of legally qualified staff, signposting where necessary to other advice agencies (Russell, 2013). The impetus for the clinic was, and remains, social justice.

There is significant unmet legal need in the United Kingdom, including London (Hogan Lovells & Southwark Law Centre, 2018), particularly since the restriction of civil legal aid in 2013, and the clinic cannot see all those who present themselves, contributing to the problem of referral fatigue (Russell, 2016).3 The clinic has been supplemented by court help desks, offering immediate information to litigants in person on a similar model of supervision. Clinical legal education is intimately connected to critical pedagogy since it offers significant opportunities for students to experience “greater agency, autonomy and . . . justice” (SpearIt & Ledesma, 2014, p. 251) in a real-life context. Clinic staff have been active on the law and technology module, seeking meaningful and ethical use of digital tools and resources to address unmet legal need.

Law and Technology: The Explosion

The legal world that our students will enter is changing rapidly. They are not alone. All professions, from journalism to education, are facing “fundamental and irreversible change” in which “increasingly capable [digital] systems will bring transformations to professional work that will resemble the impact of industrialization on traditional craftsmanship” (Susskind & Susskind, 2015, pp. 1, 2). In the context of law, even before COVID-19, the use of digital technologies to undertake different aspects of legal work (i.e., lawtech) was rising exponentially. Susskind (2017) argues that the employment market for law graduates will be affected adversely but that new jobs will emerge bridging the gap between technologists and lawyers—this can also be seen in other fields, such as education. Large firms are recognizing the need for such roles and setting up lawtech training schemes. At the least, new lawyers will need an understanding of how digital tools such as chatbots and document preparation systems work. Over the past few years, we have sought to prepare our students to step into that space, both practically and with a critical understanding of the social and ethical implications of changes to the law and legal practice that will ensue.

However, today’s students, of all disciplines, will not just be working in the new world. They will also be living in it and, at the same time, shaping it. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us some of the surprising shifts in patterns of living and working that we can expect and demonstrated how technology, more easily accessed by the wealthy and educated, can exacerbate existing inequalities. Morris and Stommel (2018) argue that “computers manifest human politics and human politics are made manifest in our technologies.” We are keen to develop students’ critical consciousness—a Freirean concept that hooks (1994, p. 14) defines as “critical engagement and awareness”—in this area (for more on critical consciousness, see Chapters 6 and 13 of this volume). This means that students should be able to evaluate the law, the technologies available, and the effects of both on users and wider society and therefore implement change.

Law and Technology Module

As both lawyers and educators, we began to ask whether, through a critical analysis of technology, we could develop some solutions to the problems of access to justice faced by clients of our clinic and other advice agencies here and abroad. Fortunately, colleagues in computer sciences were eager to collaborate with us. They were looking for external “clients” for student projects. Initially, we brought students together for an extracurricular hackathon, and law staff went into computer science classes as clients. Hush (2019) describes one of the first projects to emerge, automating a client questionnaire to provide a document suitable for use by unrepresented parties in child custody proceedings. It was clear that there was space for a joint module in which computer science and law students could work together to explore critically and address legal problems.

The law and technology module is currently offered as a compulsory practical project for final-year computer science students and an option for final-year law students. There are about five computer science students to every law student in the class. Students analyze the impact of lawtech on law and the delivery of legal services and work in mixed teams to develop a piece of legal technology software to design or prototype stage.

Assessment is in two parts. Students work together as an interdisciplinary team to create inclusive access to justice resources (70% of the module mark). Each team is given a “client,” a member of the law staff from outside the module team, legal practitioners, and charities, which offer a brief based upon a real-world problem for the team to solve. The group develops a prototype solution using software of its own choice. In theory, the law student researches the law, and the computer science students build the prototype, though in practice the roles become slightly more blurred. The other 30% of assessment consists of a reflection on an aspect of law and technology and how the students are going to apply their learning from the module in their future career aspirations.

Pedagogical Praxis

The word critical can have several meanings (Rorabaugh, 2020), but for lawyers it means questioning the law on behalf of clients and exposing students to situations in which they too will question it. Social justice is at the heart of the student projects. Students from both disciplines confront the structural inequalities of the world of clinic clients, in which accessing the digital world can be an almost insurmountable hurdle for some and basic legal rights are routinely denied by rogue landlords, violent partners, or employers to others. At the same time, following Giroux’s (2013, p. 7) prescription, “critical pedagogy becomes a project that stresses the need for teachers and students to actively transform knowledge rather than simply consume it.” Students take that next step by working on a project to take action on these inequalities. In doing so, they not only develop academic skills and knowledge but also learn how to become responsible citizens and active participants in their communities. Law students are exposed to discussions about human rights and inequality from their first year, but for some computer science students this is completely new territory, and the clients note their immediate engagement and interest. This fulfills McLaren’s (2019, p. 178) demand that “critical pedagogy is about the creation of critical citizenship” rather than “consumer citizenship.”

Technology cannot be welcomed uncritically either. COVID-19 has accelerated the existing debate about whether access to justice is best achieved through technological solutions and how the digital divide can be bridged. In an ideal world, all potential clients would be able to access in-person legal advice directly, but technology can at least help to bridge the gap for some. It is crucial that those building and using the technology understand both its power and its potential perils. Our innovation in this module is in asking students to learn, use, and develop or shape technology in a direct attempt to further social justice. As Papert (1981, p. 4) wrote, computers are “carriers of powerful ideas and of the seeds of cultural change. . . . [T]hey can help people form new relationships with knowledge that cut across traditional lines.” Students are actively involved in creating digital applications that could transform the information and advice available to users of the Legal Advice Clinic and similar organizations. We see this as a “pedagogy of hacking” (Morris & Stommel, 2018).5

This is a powerful model for teaching because, first, instead of being passive consumers of technology through the virtual learning environment or social media, the students are building something with it. This is revolutionary for both law and computer science students in different ways. Studying law consists of using words in written or, to a lesser extent, spoken form. Outputs tend to be transient even where they are grounded in real experience, such as advice given to a clinic client. The computer scientists in this module are not expected to develop solutions from scratch but instead to make appropriate use of existing technologies, familiar to them if not to the rest of us. However, our computer science colleague notes that “it is normal for computer science students to be building systems using technology, but it is very different to be building a system to address a real problem that supports social justice. It provides great motivation for students, which they cannot get by working on made up set tasks or case studies” (L. Otoyo, personal communication, August 12, 2020).

Second, the involvement of the computer scientists and the following collaborative work demystify the tech (for a similar discussion, see Chapter 7 of this volume) for the lawyers, law students, legal academics, and visiting experts, making it potentially more accessible. There is a long-standing argument in the lawtech community over whether lawyers need to be able to code. Watching our students at work together indicates that this is unnecessary, but nevertheless familiarity with the tech, its possibilities and limitations, can empower the user.

Third, the students make deliberate choices about the use of technologies; they have agency in the process. While recognizing that technology cannot be neutral, we are open to different choices. Technologies are evaluated based upon their suitability for the purpose and the extent to which they satisfy the values underpinning the module. Students consider the ethical implications of what they are building and how they are building it, including issues of accessibility and inclusion. Often the students have direct personal experience of the issues involved or know people who do. They are aware of the human dimension of the legal problem, and studying the module helps to bring this home to them. This is an additional layer of expertise that benefits the project since the students concerned can identify the key issues and problems that projects must address. Suggestions from students help us to see the projects in a new light, and we learn from them, underlining the importance of co-construction.

Fourth, the reflective process aimed at social justice requires that all of the students understand the needs, circumstances, and living situations of users. These aspects are then taken into account through the processes of legal design. This can be seen from the domestic violence project described above, in which clumsy implementation could make the user’s situation even worse. This reminds us that, as Dewey and Dewey (1915, p. 246) noted, “unless the mass of workers are to be blind cogs and pinions in the apparatus they employ, they must have some understanding of the physical and social facts behind and ahead of the material and appliances with which they are dealing.”

We have started the journey of encouraging the “agency and ultimate empowerment of learners” (Rorabaugh, 2020), but this can and should grow. Students’ active involvement in the projects that underlie the module can have a transformative effect. At present, projects are proposed by lecturers and outside experts, but students work in the clinic, and in other advice settings, and experience legal problems themselves. We could open up the proposal system to allow the wider student body to suggest projects.

The module, and the products designed in it, are first steps toward social justice transformation. They are still at the prototype stage, but we are sharing our practice with other universities and advice agencies in the United Kingdom and farther afield and working on selected prototypes in order to put them into action. Note that interdisciplinarity need not stop with computer science—there is the potential to include colleagues in education, psychology, housing studies, criminology, and other disciplines within the basic model. We believe that, though we have started with a relatively small and limited module, this co-constructed, reflective, iterative, and critical approach has far-reaching potential.

Conclusion

The experience from our project is easily transferable to other law schools in the United Kingdom, and we are happy to discuss that experience in more detail. Is it transferable to other disciplines and other countries? We would argue that it is. For example, education and computer science students could work with learners in their community to develop digital learning or support resources.

Digital technology is not simply a mode of delivery—it is the subject of the learning itself, a revolutionary development for law students. In our context, students from law and computer science are taken outside their comfort zones, and we ask them to think about how they are being taught and what they are learning. The reflective aspect of the assessment reinforces this. Above all, the module encourages real-world engagement with profound social problems, and we recognize that students from both disciplines bring their own lived experiences—whether as tenants, benefit claimants, employees, or victims of human rights abuses—to the design and development of the products; in the process, students show us how they can be the agents of change in the world.

Key Takeaways

• We have developed an interdisciplinary law and technology module driven by social justice and student agency.
• The module enables a critical approach to the inequalities of access in the current legal system and the potential of technology to solve them.
• The principles of legal design, based upon design thinking, help students to construct accessible, inclusive, and user-centred resources.
• Learning in the module is iterative and reflective and comes from the process of co-construction.
• Students in this module not only develop academic skills and knowledge but also learn how to become responsible citizens and active participants in their communities.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to the law and technology team for their contributions. Andy Unger, head of the Law Division, and Lucia Otoyo, deputy head of the Division of Computer Science and Informatics, devised the module. Robert Hush and Alan Russell, senior lecturers in the Law Division, were in the team of internal and external expert clients.

Notes

References