New Frontiers of Legal Knowledge: How Design Provotypes Can Contribute to Legal Change

Legal change is a complex phenomenon. Transplants, imitations, borrowings, assimilations by chance or for prestige, adoptions and rejections, and cross-fertilization are all dynamic processes, which correspond to the past and the present of world legal systems—they are not just a matter of the “sovereign will” of a state and its sovereign power. Beyond the state, supranational institutions of various kinds are the global agents responsible for shaping legal order reform. Their actions are the preserve of a multitude of forces, including transnational epistemic communities across the globe. What is less explored is how legal change can be the outcome of individual and collective actions, in an age when, for the first time in human history, social organizations depend on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This fact radically affects the legal sphere. How do these collectives and individuals exercise their rights and how are they reminded of their duties, thus playing a major role in delineating the boundaries of the relationship between themselves, legal institutions, and legal change? What legal change is implied by the empirical analysis of the social acts involved in what they do? While legal transplantation theory explicitly deals with how legal change is produced with reference to national and transnational legal institutions, the recognition of speculative design practice in the legal domain can raise awareness of pressing societal issues and bolster individual and collective civic agency over transformation and legal change, through imagination and critical thinking.