You can attend the Legal Design Workshop for free if your abstract is accepted.

Contact the organizers for other options.

Legal Design has evolved from a niche concept into a recognized discipline, yet demonstrating its impact on legal processes, rules, and institutions remains a substantially underdeveloped area of inquiry. The effects on legal research, practice, and education are, and should be, varied, requiring diversified methods and criteria of evaluation. 

Several challenges account for this gap. Some stem from the absence of a shared understanding of what legal design is and what falls outside its scope. Others arise from the open-textured multi- and interdisciplinarity of this nascent field — where information design, UX design, and service design, among others, operate in productive but often unresolved tension. Further complexity is introduced by the discipline's international dimension and the divergences across legal traditions (e.g., common law vs. civil law systems) and legal domains. Compounding these difficulties, a persistent divide separates academic scholarship from professional practice: the two communities frequently operate with different conceptual frameworks, priorities, and languages. 

This workshop is conceived as a structured space to bridge that gap. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, educators, and students, it aims to collaboratively develop a preliminary methodological toolkit — one that accounts for the discipline's internal plurality and assembles methods and documented examples of measurable impact, understood broadly and not confined to empirical or quantitative approaches.

✍️ Call for Papers ✍️

We invite researchers, legal practitioners, designers, and PhD candidates to submit their work for presentation and discussion during our interactive sessions. We are specifically looking for contributions that demonstrate how Legal Design is measured, tested, and implemented.

We welcome submissions on (but not limited to) the following topics:

• Empirical Studies in Legal Contexts: Contributions presenting and critically evaluating the application of legal design methods across different legal domains, from small-scale usability testing to large-scale empirical studies. 

• Methodological Innovations: Proposals of new frameworks for integrating design methods and thinking into legal research, education, or practice, including approaches to driving organizational and systemic change within institutions.

• Theoretical Foundations: Reflections on the disciplinary status of legal design and its relationship to established academic fields. Contributions may draw on the history of other emerging legal disciplines to examine how legal design might consolidate its own theoretical identity and scholarly legitimacy.

• Impact Systematization: Critical assessments of what is currently known about the impact of legal design interventions, alongside identification of gaps that warrant further investigation. Submissions are encouraged to engage with the question of what counts as evidence of impact and under what conditions it can be meaningfully measured.

Submission Guidelines and Publication

The submission process occurs in two steps. Acceptance to the workshop is based on a single-blind peer review of an abstract. If the abstract is accepted for presentation at the workshop, the author(s) should submit a full academic paper or a practical use case that will be made available to workshop participants and peer-reviewed by at least one member of the Program Committee. Contributions may be published or unpublished material, but we will prioritize unpublished material in the selection process. 

Abstract submission - July 1st, 2026

Abstract format: A 500-word abstract outlining a method, theory or type of design intervention; its benefits and limitations; the observed or expected (scientific, societal, etc.) impact; and a short bio of the author(s). Auxiliary material (visuals, videos, interactive resources, etc.) can be included or provided on external repositories via a hyperlink. 

How to submit: Send your abstract in PDF format to legal-design[at]unisg.ch with the subject line “CfP: St. Gallen Legal Design Workshop” by July 1, 2026. Specify if it is published or unpublished material.

Full submission - October 4th, 2026

Full paper format: between 5,000 and 10,000 words for full articles, including footnotes and excluding references.

Use case format: between 1000-5000 words.

The full submissions will be made available to the other participants ahead of the workshop. We will share detailed information with the accepted authors.

Presentation

Accepted submissions will receive a 15-minute "Lightning Talk" slot, followed by a moderated deep-dive discussion. 

Publication (optional)

We will not publish workshop proceedings, but selected, original, unpublished work may be submitted through a fast-track to the Legal Design Journal (open access). 

Important deadlines

Abstract submission: July 1, 2026

Communication of acceptance: August 1, 2026

Submission of full papers: October 4, 2026

Workshop: November 4, 2026

[Optional] Submission of unpublished full papers or use cases to the Legal Design Journal: January 22, 2027

Contact

If you wish to attend without submitting a paper, contact the organizers at legal-design[at]unisg.ch. 

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! 

Organizing institutions

This is a Google Site with no Google Analytics enabled. The organizers will only collect and share with the program committee the information you share with us over legal-design[at]unisg.ch. If your abstract gets accepted the presenters name and paper title will be shared on the schedule on this website.